‘Rumble’ Draws Millions to Unfiltered Videos Rich with Misinformation
By Jaden Satenstein, July 15, 2022
Conservative host Dan Bongino holds nothing back. After all, his weekly Fox News show, which premiered in June 2021, is literally called “Unfiltered.”
So, when YouTube prevented him from monetizing that lack of a filter in the fall of 2020, Bongino decided it was time for a change. Complaining that YouTube had blocked him from earning ad revenue from 80 percent of his videos, which contained frequent misinformation, Bongino encouraged his more than 600,000 subscribers to migrate to Rumble, a growing online video platform in which he had just taken an equity stake.
It was a risky move. At the time, Rumble, founded in 2013 by Canadian tech entrepreneur Chris Pavloski, mostly featured videos of funny cats, cute babies and the work of small-scale content creators. But the last laugh was Bongino’s. His Rumble show now has 2.34 million subscribers, more than two-and-a-half times the number he had on YouTube when that platform permanently suspended him in January 2022 for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
From Cats to Conservatives
And Bongino is not the only conservative to make the leap. Today, the site’s home page features clips from One America News Network (OANN), Eric Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. How did Rumble, a platform once full of mindless, benign content, become a hotbed of far-right discourse and misinformation?
Creating a right-wing refuge was never the main goal of the site, Pavlovski has stated numerous times. He started Rumble to compete with big-tech companies by providing an alternative compensation model to that of sites like YouTube. Arguing that YouTube suppresses content from small-scale creators and only promotes popular influencers and brands, Pavlovski designed Rumble to better compensate creators not only through ad revenue, but also by paying them to license their videos. (Pavlovski did not respond to TheRighting’s request for a comment for this story.)
But it’s the company’s looser content moderation policies that have right-wing personalities like Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Glenn Greenwald and Representative Matt Gaetz flocking to Rumble.
‘A Refuge from the Cancel Culture’
“Over the last two years, many creators and users have realized that Rumble is a refuge from the cancel culture,” Pavlovski wrote in an essay posted to House Minority Leader Republican Kevin McCarthy’s website in January. “We have grown rapidly in size as media superstars including Dan Bongino and Gov. Ron DeSantis have taken Rumble by storm. Whenever YouTube cancels someone like Dr. Rand Paul for committing a so-called ‘thought crime,’ we gain momentum and subscribers.”
Rumble saw 8.585 million unique visitors in May 2022, far surpassing other conservative social media sites such as Parler and MeWe, according to recent Comscore data. Former President Donald Trump, who was famously banned from Twitter and Facebook following the January 6 Capitol attack, joined Rumble on June 26, 2021, just hours before his first rally following the riot. He now has 1.4 million subscribers on the site, where he livestreams his rallies.
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) also partnered with Rumble to provide cloud services for Truth Social, Trump’s new social media site. By creating its own cloud service infrastructure, Rumble has avoided the fate of Parler, which was forced to temporarily go offline in January 2021 after Amazon Web Services removed it from its cloud hosting service. Google and Apple also removed Parler from their app stores in response to the platform’s role in the Capitol attack.
“Rumble’s cloud infrastructure is second to none and will be the backbone for the restoration of free speech online for ages to come,” CEO of TMTG Devin Nunes said in an April press release.
Filled with Falsehoods
Rumble makes it clear that it is not in the business of curtailing conspiracy theories and false news. Unlike Twitter and Facebook. the company has no rules against the spread of misinformation,
“I don’t want to pretend to sit here and know what the truth is or have the capabilities to know how to do that,” Pavlovski told the New York Times in an interview after the 2020 election.
A few minutes on Rumble attests to the company’s lack of interest in separating fact from fiction. If you search “vaccine” on the site, the first video that appears argues that the COVID-19 vaccine is not safe for children. It has more than 162,000 views. If you search “election,” the top result is a 42-minute video perpetuating false claims of election fraud in 2020. That one has more than 256,000 views.
“We’re not involved in fact-checking,” Pavlovski told Fortune in November 2020. “We’re not arbitrators of truth.”
Jaden Satenstein (@jadensat) is a writer and producer currently based in St. Louis, MO. She has worked for WNYC, FRONTLINE PBS, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Straus News Manhattan.
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Rumble’s looser content moderation policies have right-wing personalities like Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Glenn Greenwald and Representative Matt Gaetz flocking to the video-sharing site. They and other prominent personalities view Rumble as a refuge from cancel culture.
