Rumble Is Still Where The Right Goes To Play
Image; Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash
There has been a narrative about the alternative video streaming platform Rumble that it's a place where conservatives spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. "Fact-Checked on Facebook and Twitter, Conservatives Switch Their Apps" goes one title for the New York Times. "The rise of Rumble, the conservative alternative to YouTube," read another title for Deseret News.
Recently the company has attempted to "diversify" its content by reaching out to alternative influencers such as Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald, but this has had very little impact on the platform. Rumble still is a site where conservatives spread misinformation, and that's not something ancillary to the company's goals but strikes at the heart of how it operates.
Rumble has a reputation as the conservative YouTube. While this is something they foster directly through content moderation (or a lack thereof), they also try to be a site about more than simply conservatives ranting about politics. The Editors Pick section is usually of light content, such as a cockatiel not letting their owner use their laptop or of a dog performing ninja rolls.
Image; Captured 9/27/2021 10:26 AM
Their CEO Chris Pavlovski went on record on FOX Business in April of 2021, emphasizing that the platform is focused more on "fairness" than on regulating their content. "We're not interested in taking any position on any type of content," Pavlovski said, "we just want to be a platform, and I believe that's why we've seen so much growth."
We see this strategy of trying to distance the platform from the conservative brand with the company contracting out alternative content creators such as Glenn Greenwald, who is allegedly being paid somewhere in the midrange of "six figures." As influencer Greenwald tweeted recently:
"One key person who moved to Rumble with me: Tulsi Gabbard. A 4-term Dem Congresswoman from Hawaii & a vegan. She quit as DNC Vice Chair to support Bernie in 2016. She endorsed Biden over Trump in 2020. Yet they still claim she's right-wing & Rumble is an alt-right site? How?"
Yet, despite these protests, it's hard not to escape the conservative bent on the website. As of writing this article, the Top Video, which appears at the literal top of the desktop version, is a live stream for a Steven Crowder video "debunking" a John Oliver segment about Voter ID laws being racist. Crowder is a popular, conservative content creator, not just on Rumble but all over the Internet. He appeared on the front page multiple times while I prepared research for this article.
Image; Captured 9/28/2021 10:49 AM
This preference for conservative content is everywhere. For example, if you go over to the News section, one of the few traditional outlets you will find is Reuters. The closest thing after that is the center-left site Newsy. These channels provide more "traditional" news stories that you would see in any mainstream paper or program, and in fact, Reuters seems to be reposting videos from their YouTube channel.
Everything else ranges from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post to the conservative Canadian rag The Post Millennial to Sean Hannity. The "stories" from these news channels fit the mold you would expect. "White liberal in gorilla mask attacks Larry Elder with egg," reads the title for one salacious clip from The Post Millenial. "Democrats hell-bent on hiking taxes, imperiling economy," reads the Devin Nunes Press, a channel simply rebranding all of the representatives' television appearances and public statements as "news."
Even tamer content is often backed by conservative influencers. The Entertainment section may have some stereotypical content from the likes of Page Six, but the section also has an exposé criticizing AOC's MET Gala dress from Glenn Greenwald as well as a skit about leftism being a virus from influencer Awaken With JP. "It begins to infect the brain by a process called Marxism," the influencer jokes in their video Beware of the Tyrant Variant!.
Most of the main sections under the front page, except for the Viral section, are like this: the Sports section has content like "Vaccine Lunacy: Passports and Packed Stadiums" from the OutKick; the Finance section has a video from Tim Pool lamenting that the entire Global Economy will meltdown because of Biden's bad job report; the Podcast and Battle Leaderboard sections are almost exclusively filled with conservative influencers from the likes of Dan Bongino and Matt Walsh.
Image; Rumble captured 9/29/21 at 12:09 pm.
And, of course, so far, we have been talking around the edges of the problem. If even the tamest content has a far-right conservative bent to it, then imagine what the "actual" content focuses on.
You can find pretty much every mainstream conservative influencer here, from Tim Pool to Ben Shapiro to even former 45th President Donald J. Trump. These actors engage in the usual culture wars content that has proliferated on the Internet since the early 2010s. There are countless videos about Antifa (e.g., anti-fascism), Black Lives Matter, or whatever social issue of the day happens to be the focus of the feed, but it doesn't just stop and end with anti-social justice warrior monologues. Many of these actors also spread a lot of misinformation (more on this later).
Rumble is not the only one that struggles with this problem. YouTube has long been cited as a major distributor of misinformation. Facebook still grapples with an array of issues, from anti-vaccine groups to white supremacist comics. Its subsidiary Instagram also struggles with this problem. A recent Washington Post article highlighted wellness advocates using Instagram to advocate against vaccine usage. Even now, several of the users they profiled still have much of their original content up.
Image; captured on Instagram on 9/28/21 3:06 pm
Even if they are not always successful, these companies have tried to compensate for these gaps. YouTube, for example, has removed millions of COVID-related videos for spreading misinformation and regularly auto-flags creators who use the word vaccine. The influencer nappyheadedjojoba recently did a video about vaccine hesitancy, and she had to use the word "vacuum" to get around the censor. There will most likely always be people like this finding creative ways around the blocks, but it signals that these companies are at least trying to mitigate the risk of disinformation (even if its taken them years to reach this point)
Rumble's hands-off approach, however, means that misinformation proliferates more quickly. It's long been reported that Rumble is rampant with COVID vaccine conspiracies, which remains true to this day. A quick search will reveal pages upon pages of information critical of the vaccine. The site is a hotbed of people advocating against it. It's easy to find videos with a veneer of credibility, which has the potential to confuse viewers uneducated in science literacy.
Image; Rumble, captured 9/29/21 at 10:38 pm.
For example, one recently published video, titled 33 Doctors Say DON'T TAKE THE VACCINE, has 33 alleged doctors claiming that the vaccine is unsafe for human use. "I would like to say," remarks one speaker, "that the new COVID-19 vaccine is not safe and that there is no global medical pandemic." This video first circulated in 2020 across social media, and all of its claims have been thoroughly debunked, but while it has been taken down on sites like Instagram, it remains on Rumble. Just one of the hundreds, possibly thousands of anti-COVID vaccine videos making the rounds on the site.
COVID misinformation is not the only unregulated area of content. It's also possible to find videos discussing the Deep State (a conspiracy theory about a secret, unauthorized network independently running things behind the scenes) or how Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was a lie. In no particular order, I also found videos taking the Illuminati seriously, ones claiming that many famous people are, in fact, clones, videos about a mysterious New World Order controlling things, ones endorsing the idea that the Earth is flat, and many more.
YouTube also has Flat Earthers on the platform, but they are usually hidden from search results. If you type in the keyword "flat earth" into search results, you will get many videos debunking flat earth ideology. The one hit on the first page that appeared to be the opposite, 5 Facts That Prove The Earth Is Flat, ended up being a joke video making fun of the ideology. To find Flat Earther influencers on YouTube, you will have to search for their channel directly.
Yet on Rumble, all you have to do is search.
Image; YouTube/Rumble captured on 9/29/21 at 10:50 am
As for hate speech, in general, Rumble doesn't permit overtly discriminatory language. You won't easily find videos throwing around the N-word, endorsing the KKK, or telling trans people that they should kill themselves. The way discrimination occurs here is usually far more indirect. The majority of videos that do exist are discriminatory in how they frame marginalized groups and leftist issues. If you type in the acronym "LGBT," outside of reporting from Reuters, you will get hits about "LGBT mobs" and the "LGBT agenda." If you type in "Black Lives Matter," you will see videos about "abuses" from protesters. These videos aren't calling for active discrimination, but the Rumble community is systemically framing marginalized people as an other.
The site is not content-neutral because there is very clearly a conservative bias. This preferential treatment has a chilling effect as leftist users do not use it because it's not for them. It is geared towards far-right conservatives who face no accountability unless they are hateful in the most overt ways. I have spent a lot of time searching for leftist users on Rumble, and I have not found anyone outside of Tulsi Gabbard who has a very touch-and-go relationship with the Leftist movement. There is no reason to believe that Rumble will diversify its user base anytime soon.
This doesn't mean other more mainstream sites are free from discrimination. In fact, many of the most prolific people on Rumble, from Ben Shapiro to Steven Crowder, still have a presence on sites like YouTube. This framing problem exists on those platforms too, but at least they have made an effort to diversify their audience. Why would you leave YouTube, a site that at least has some leftist communities, to use a site you are not welcome in? A site with worse UI and an even worse atmosphere.
In trying not to take "any position on any type of content," Rumble has created an environment where the most conservative and often detached voices have a home. When CEO Chris Pavlovski speaks of "fairness," they are using a dog whistle prevalent in conservative circles, harkening all the way back to Fox News' original slogan, "Fair and Balanced." This alleged fairness is not about accepting all voices but allowing the most hateful a safe space not to be criticized.
Chris Pavlovski is not a neutral actor. His site was operating on a shoe-string budget before it received interest from the right. Following the rights’ alleged purge from more mainstream spaces, Rumble has now received funding from conservatives like Peter Thiel and Darren Blanton. Pavlovski has a material interest in not pissing off his site's conservative demographic because that's where the money is, and it shows in how they let quite frankly harmful information proliferate there.
The truth that we have learned in the modern era is that there is no such thing as not taking a position on content moderation. Platforms are so complex that the mere act of weighting selections and curating lists is a reflection of values, even if we are not always consciously aware of what those values are. All platforms inherently select certain voices while choosing not to center others. By seeming to focus on the right, Rumble has created a platform where conspiracy theories abound, and hatred festers.
Rumble is still where the right goes to play, and it's a powder keg waiting to happen.