Rumble, the Right’s Go-To Video Site, Has Much Bigger Ambitions

Red Pill News and the X22 Report are no longer available on YouTube. The far-right online shows were taken down in the fall of 2020 after major social media and tech companies began to purge accounts that spread the conspiracy theory.

Both of them are on a video-sharing platform that has their content ranked among the most popular.

Over the last week, as Republicans opened a misleading attack on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Red Pill News and the X22 Report posted videos claiming that her nomination to the Supreme Court by President Biden was proof anyone needed that.

The host of the X22 Report implored his viewers to think about the bigger picture in an episode posted on Wednesday. People are listening to this and they are seeing how these people think and how they are trying to change it.

After the 2020 election, conservatives and supporters of former President Donald J. Trump embraced it, and in one day, that episode was viewed almost 220,000 times. Its users and financial backers see it as the new frontier in social media, a network built by and for them, where virtually anything goes.

The company is based in Toronto and has tens of millions of dollars in financing from right-of-center entrepreneurs.

According to Similarweb, the site draws 44 million visitors a month, giving it a larger reach than other conservative sites, such as Newsmax and The Daily Wire. In the first nine months of last year, most of the revenue was from advertising, but it was not profitable. After merging with a special purpose acquisition company, it has announced plans to trade publicly in the middle of this year.

Both sides of the debate over balancing the right to free speech with the growing threat of misinformation can learn from the success of Rumble. For those who argue that Facebook and Google are flawed instruments for policing discourse, Rumble is a welcome alternative. It has opened up a potentially dangerous loophole for those who fear that lawmakers and technology companies aren't doing enough to tame false and fabricated information ahead of the next presidential election.

The president of Media Matters said that there was something significant about Rumble that he didn't think people appreciated. Mr. Carusone said that the work that went into persuading Facebook, Google and Twitter to be more aggressive about policing fake and inciting content prevented a lot of it from breaking through to a wider audience.

He said that the game was changed by the rumour.

Chris Pavlovski said he did not set out to create a platform where right-wing content is favored when he started it. He said that he thought of Rumble as an alternative to the approach that large tech companies took a decade ago when they began to promote the content of a select group of people.

There is no ideology here. In an interview with a popular content creator, Mr. Pavlovski said that they were just neutral.

He described his mission as a movement that does not stifle, censor or punish creativity. He chastised social media and search engine companies like DuckDuckGo when it said it would steer people away from sites that promoted misinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The app was deleted from his phone.

The democratizing vision for speech online has mostly appealed to people on the right. Extremists who use their Rumble accounts to deny the effectiveness of vaccines, play down the human toll of Russia's aggression in Ukraine and question the legitimacy of the 2020 election are included. Those with fringe beliefs are not alone in their criticism of online censorship.

There is a large audience to be had, and one that some who study far-right content online warn has been left unchecked to grow into a powerful political weapon for conservatives and supporters of Mr. Trump.

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Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and intelligence analyst who is working with the commission in Congress investigating the Jan. 6 attack, said that the alternate universe has already bloomed.

Mr. Pavlovski and his representatives did not respond to interview requests.

He made clear in streamed remarks to the creators of the app that his ambitions are far more important than increasing traffic to his website. A kind of alt-web that is entirely distinct from the dominant players is what Mr. Pavlovski has described.

With its own cloud service infrastructure and video streaming capacity, and the assurance that they can be shut down if one of those providers decides to pull, it's easy to see how Rumble can be more independent from the Amazons and Microsofts of the internet. The experience of the social media network Parler, which effectively shut down once Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, looms large in the minds of Rumble fans.

The promise of independence from the tech giants led Mr. Trump to have Rumble provide technology and cloud services for Truth Social, which has struggled to become fully operational on its own. Mr. Trump said in his December statement that he picked the service providers who did not discriminate against political ideology.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has been vocal about his beliefs that technology conglomerates and the mainstream media have too much power to quash speech, is one of the popular content creators who Rumble has secured exclusive arrangements with. The partnership with Mr. Greenwald was an example of content neutral. Rumble does not tolerate anything that is racist, promotes violence or breaks the law.

The company doesn't talk about the popular creators in their news releases, like Alex Jones, who was banned from mainstream platforms in the fall of 2018, and now has more than 100,000 followers.

That's a small number compared to the millions of people who followed Mr. Jones on the internet. The traffic data available for individual sites includes a lot of overlap from users who frequent more than one so it's hard to tell how large the audience is for hard-right content.

Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of a book about the ways conservative outlets reinforce their messages through repetition and shut down dissent, said that it is an intensely engaged population. He said that the audience is likely to be larger than the size on paper.

The reality is that 80 million people voted for Trump. There is something going on.

Dan Bongino, the pro-Trump host and former Secret Service agent who replaced Rush Limbaugh in some radio markets and streams his daily show on Rumble toPukiWikiPukiWikiPukiWikis of 2.2 million subscribers, is one of the marquee names. Mr. Bongino shows the difficulties of policing misinformation and conspiracy theories. In the fall of 2020 he was taken down by YouTube for violating its policies meant to stop the spread of false stories about the coronaviruses.

Mr. Bongino made it his preferred video platform after he was unable to collect ad revenue from the site.

In the weeks and months that followed, as Mr. Trump refused to accept his loss in the election, others jumped on board with Rumble, too, including One America News.

On the day after the partnership was announced, Mr. Pavlovski said that his company wouldn't censor that kind of speech.