How Rumble, a Toronto-based YouTube alternative, became a refuge for the MAGA crowd (with a US$2-billion valuation)

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A few months ago, a woman who goes by the name of Redpill The World uploaded a video to her tens of thousands of followers on a website called Rumble. Sunglasses atop her blond highlights, she started by playing footage from a Donald Trump rally and was soon wiping away tears. “We are so blessed to be Americans,” she said.

The woman then careened from one topic to the next, incensed at having read online that Dr. Anthony Fauci paid for training seminars on boosting the transmissibility of the COVID-19 virus (which he did not). “Our tax dollars paying for a bioweapon to kill us,” Redpill huffed. She pulled up an article from a dubious website claiming a World Health Organization official could face the death penalty for discouraging the use of ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasites in animals and humans, as a treatment for coronavirus. “This woman deserves to die,” she said. “I’m serious!” She then turned to QAnon, the kaleidoscopic conspiracy theory involving the former U.S. president’s shadow war against Satan-worshipping pedophiles. She decoded hidden messages in a statement from Mr. Trump referencing philanthropist George Soros – or, according to Redpill, “our true enemy.”

For 45 minutes, her energy never flagged. “I can say Q, I can say Trump, I can say fraud, I can say all of this!” she gushed. “On Rumble, we can.”

People say a lot of things on Rumble – about free speech, the radical left, making America great again and so on. In the past year and a half, Rumble’s growth has exploded as right-leaning content creators and politicians have flocked to the site. Two years ago, Rumble was lucky to crack a million average monthly users. In the third quarter of last year, it hit 36 million. You can find everyone from journalist Glenn Greenwald to Republicans like Devin Nunes to conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro posting there. Mr. Trump, expunged by Facebook and Twitter last year, has a Rumble account featuring videos of his rallies.

The company is run not by an American conservative firebrand but by Chris Pavlovski, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and business-school dropout in Toronto. When he founded it in 2013, he didn’t intend to build a site that would be heralded by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, as a way to “stand up to Big Tech censorship.” For years, it was a repository of cute pet and baby clips. But life is funny. One day you’re the steward of videos like “adorable baby flexes muscles” and the next, Donald Trump Jr. shows up to rail against liberal snowflakes. “Everyone wants to say Rumble is this or that,” Mr. Pavlovski says, “but really we’re just a video platform, and that’s all we wanted to be.”

He’s definitely seizing the moment, though. In May, he raised funding that valued Rumble at US$500-million, and in December he struck a deal with a Cantor Fitzgerald special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to go public on the Nasdaq. In the span of a few months, Rumble’s valuation surged to US$2.1-billion. Should the deal go through, Rumble will have access to US$400-million in cash. (Mr. Pavlovski won’t disclose revenue but says the company is not profitable.) Rumble plans to hire more employees, attract more users and expand the range of content so it can shed its reputation as a home for MAGA refugees. Think less Redpill the World, and more gamers, comedians and lifestyle content.

In the press release announcing the SPAC, Mr. Pavlovski called Rumble a “neutral” platform and vowed it would be “immune to cancel culture.” Many high-profile users say they’re fed up with YouTube, believing it harbours an anti-conservative bias. Rumble’s content moderation policies, as such, are more lenient; its terms of service state videos promoting racism, antisemitism and violence are prohibited, but it does not monitor for misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.

Earlier this month, Republican Senator Rand Paul said he would no longer post to YouTube after, among other transgressions, it removed a video in which he questioned (and misrepresented, in YouTube’s view) the science behind masks. The senator urged Americans to “shun the close-minded censors and take our ideas elsewhere,” and said Rumble would be his main platform. “This is MASSIVE,” Mr. Pavlovski later tweeted.

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At a time when social-media companies are under more pressure than ever to curb the spread of harmful content, Rumble is proudly at odds with its competitors. Tech executives have been summoned to Congress to testify about their role in proliferating conspiracy theories and misinformation, while politicians and academics in the U.S. and Canada are gripped with how best to regulate large platforms. While there are no easy answers – even what constitutes “misinformation” is up for debate – Mr. Pavlovski contends that YouTube and its ilk made a grave mistake by being too restrictive. “The market was handed to us,” he says.

His position comes with risks. We’ve seen what can happen when conspiracy theories run rampant. It can contribute to an environment where a man arms himself with a rifle to investigate a pizza restaurant he believes is the nexus of a child trafficking ring, rioters storming the U.S. Capitol and people refusing vaccines in the midst of a deadly pandemic. As much as Mr. Pavlovski talks about avoiding the mistakes of YouTube, he could very well repeat them.

An interview with him took months to set up. He was busy with Rumble, he said, but somewhat wary of reporters. Over the past few months, his company had been accused of sending “viewers tumbling toward misinformation” by Wired and branded as “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities” by a researcher in The Washington Post.

When we met at a coffee shop near Rumble’s downtown Toronto office in October, Mr. Pavlovski balked when I pulled out a tape recorder and said he’d prefer to talk only on background. (He came around when I explained I couldn’t write a proper profile without quoting him.) Despite the apprehension, he was excited. The day before, Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster on Spotify globally, had given Rumble a shoutout. “I think that place is going to grow,” he said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “We’ll keep saying the name Rumble … get people to keep going over there.” (The unvaccinated podcaster recently made headlines when his show at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, which requires performers to be vaccinated, was cancelled.)

Mr. Pavlovski tweeted the clip along with five head-exploding emojis. The company was so smitten that its investor presentation, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, devotes an entire slide to the quote and a picture of Mr. Rogan. (He is not on Rumble, though Mr. Pavlovski has reached out.)

Tall and lanky with stubble on his face, Mr. Pavlovski says he’s not a political person. “I’ve never really discussed politics with him straight up,” says Dave Rubin, an American conservative pundit and Rumble shareholder. When I tell Mr. Pavlovski that someone else described him as a “small-L liberal,” he says he’d never heard the term. His own news diet is skimpy. “I listen to Joe Rogan,” he says.

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He’s now surrounded by people who live and breathe politics. That includes Mr. Rubin and Dan Bongino, a conservative talk radio host and Rumble shareholder. Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive Howard Lutnick, who has been touting Rumble in interviews since the SPAC was announced, is a large Republican donor. (The company declined an interview.)

Everything changed for Mr. Pavlovski on a summer night in 2020, when he noticed a new Rumble account for Devin Nunes. A former Republican Congressman representing California, Mr. Nunes became a staunch defender of Mr. Trump and left Congress this month to become CEO of the former president’s new media venture. At the time, Mr. Pavlovski thought the account was fake, but Mr. Nunes’s staff later arranged a call. Mr. Nunes asked one question: If someone searched for him on Rumble, would his videos show up? Perplexed, Mr. Pavlovski told him of course. The congressman suspected his content was intentionally suppressed on YouTube.

His Rumble account quickly gained followers – he now has more than 810,000 – and he has championed it ever since. “That created this incredible tsunami of people coming to our site,” Mr. Pavlovski says. Mr. Nunes later interviewed him on stage in North Carolina as part of an event called the Freedom Tour. He praised Rumble for being the “only” place where people could question whether the “Wuhan virus” was “developed by the Chi-Comms in a lab [and] possibly could have leaked out.” Mr. Pavlovski responded by comparing Rumble to a dinner table where disagreements are hashed out. “Apparently on the internet today, we’re not allowed to do that,” he said.

His frustration with large tech platforms isn’t rooted in partisan ideology; it has more to do with YouTube sinking his previous company. Mr. Pavlovski grew up in Brampton, Ont., and built websites with friends, including a low-brow user-generated video portal called Jokeroo.com in 2001. Within a few months, the site made $10,000 through advertising. His parents wanted him to continue his studies, and he enrolled in business at University of Toronto Mississauga, but he dropped out in third year to work on Jokeroo.

In 2006, Google purchased YouTube, consolidating the online video market and hobbling competitors. “They definitely monopolized the video space,” he says, “and I don’t think it was fair to the ecosystem.” Jokeroo was not long for this world (though a message board still exists).

Mr. Pavlovski later started an IT outsourcing company. But by 2013, he noticed YouTube was no longer prioritizing small creators, such as the people who just wanted to upload a funny video of their cat. Instead, YouTube was building an ecosystem of massive influencers. He started Rumble to cater to the audience YouTube was neglecting, and offered ways to license videos and protect copyright. For years, it remained a tiny player.

But then YouTube, Facebook and others adopted a more comprehensive approach to content moderation – belatedly, some critics argue. In 2018, YouTube and Facebook banned accounts associated with the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for example, for violating guidelines about hate speech and inciting violence. (Mr. Jones is notorious for claiming the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, where 20 children were killed, was a hoax.)

In 2020, YouTube updated its guidelines to prohibit content that “targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.” That included videos promoting QAnon and a related conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. The latter inspired a man in 2016 to shoot a rifle at the door of a pizza restaurant in Washington, where he believed Democrats and celebrities were running a sex-trafficking ring. Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims about electoral fraud and the hordes that mobbed the U.S. Capitol to protest a “stolen” election last January spurred another crackdown. (Despite the effort, social-media platforms have hardly rid themselves of harmful content.)

Rumble’s heavy hitters

By number of subscribers

Dan Bongino

2,000,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, vaccine mandates, Big Tech malfeasance

Donald Trump Jr.

793,000

Topics: Democratic Party incompetence, defending his dad

Steve Bannon

630,000

Topics: Electoral fraud, COVID-19, MAGA revivalism

Russell Brand

163,000

Topics: Skepticism of politicians, mainstream media and

Big Business “conveyed humorously”

Glenn Greenwald

155,000

Topics: U.S. government overreach, criticism of mainstream media

Elise Stefanik (Republican member of Congress)

105,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, Fox News interviews

the globe and mail, Source: rumble

Rumble’s heavy hitters

By number of subscribers

Dan Bongino

2,000,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, vaccine mandates, Big Tech malfeasance

Donald Trump Jr.

793,000

Topics: Democratic Party incompetence, defending his dad

Steve Bannon

630,000

Topics: Electoral fraud, COVID-19, MAGA revivalism

Russell Brand

163,000

Topics: Skepticism of politicians, mainstream media and

Big Business “conveyed humorously”

Glenn Greenwald

155,000

Topics: U.S. government overreach, criticism of mainstream media

Elise Stefanik (Republican member of Congress)

105,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, Fox News interviews

the globe and mail, Source: rumble

Rumble’s heavy hitters

By number of subscribers

Dan Bongino

2,000,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, vaccine mandates, Big Tech malfeasance

Donald Trump Jr.

793,000

Topics: Democratic Party incompetence, defending his dad

Steve Bannon

630,000

Topics: Electoral fraud, COVID-19, MAGA revivalism

Russell Brand

163,000

Topics: Skepticism of politicians, mainstream media and Big Business

“conveyed humorously”

Glenn Greenwald

155,000

Topics: U.S. government overreach, criticism of mainstream media

Elise Stefanik (Republican member of Congress)

105,000

Topics: Joe Biden criticism, Fox News interviews

the globe and mail, Source: rumble

Amid these tightening policies, right-leaning politicians and commentators amped up claims that social-media companies were stifling free expression. Some, like Mr. Nunes, sought alternatives. Rumble also launched a fortuitously timed lawsuit. In January, 2021, it accused Google in a U.S. court of “unfairly rigging its search algorithms” to favour YouTube videos over competitors, which brought more attention to the company.

By then, other right-leaning personalities had joined Rumble, including Dan Bongino. A former Secret Service agent who has unsuccessfully run for Congress three times, Mr. Bongino is huge in right-wing media. His radio show draws about 8.5 million listeners each week, his podcast has reached No. 1 on iTunes, and he has two million followers on Rumble. He’s not unlike an angrier, more muscled Joe Rogan, and his face seems permanently fixed in a scowl as he thunders about (unfounded) electoral fraud. He also delights in combat: “I know the fact-checker losers watch my show,“ he taunted in a recent Rumble video.

In 2020, he approached Mr. Pavlovski about investing. He has supported a handful of ventures designed to be alternatives to mainstream platforms, such as a Twitter knockoff called Parler, saying it’s his “life’s project” to establish a “parallel free economy, free of censorship.” Mr. Pavlovski gladly accepted the investment. “When you have a chance to get one of the top podcasters in the world, it was a pretty simple decision for us,” he says.

On Rumble, Mr. Bongino is one of the loudest voices claiming social-media companies are engaging in censorship. So is fellow Rumble investor Dave Rubin, who helms a program called The Rubin Report. “We live in a depressingly politically correct time,” Mr. Rubin says in an interview. “Mix in so much of this woke stuff – diversity, equity and inclusion, and all this bizarre gender stuff … they’ve infiltrated these companies. So if you don’t fall in line with what they believe, they want to depress your views.” (Mr. Rubin, by the way, is paid to help Rumble with publicity.) The company’s investor presentation, meanwhile, contains a graph charting the “acceleration of Big Tech censorship.”

Ironically, The New York Times reported in 2020 that Mr. Bongino’s Facebook posts were frequently among the most popular in the U.S. And Mr. Rubin has more than 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube, 10 times his Rumble following.

One study, published last year by researchers from New York University, concluded the assertion that social-media companies suppress conservative viewpoints is unfounded. Many anecdotal examples of supposed bias don’t hold up. Facebook and Twitter permanently banned Mr. Trump in 2021, but that was a “reasonable response” to his “repeated violation of platform rules against undermining election results and inciting violence,” the authors wrote.

The censorship claim is itself a pernicious falsehood, argues Paul Barrett, one of the authors and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “It really is one of the central themes of the broader, grievance-driven, populist politics that now dominate the Republican Party,” Mr. Barrett says. “Peddling falsehoods, regardless of what the falsehoods are, almost always has a corrosive effect.”

It’s also not new. “The censorship claim is part of a historical pattern of right-wing and conservative parties and news outlets trying to gain political clout and create a common enemy for their viewers,” adds Julia DeCook, an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago who studies extremist movements.

Asked whether he believes “Big Tech censorship” is real, Mr. Pavlovski is much more subdued than Mr. Bongino. “I can only give you experiences I have. I don’t know how these companies operate,” he says. Devin Nunes, he points out, grew faster on Rumble than he ever did on YouTube, as have others. “I’m sure he calls that censorship. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what we need to figure out.”

Social-media companies are not transparent about why content is removed or accounts banned, which can deepen suspicions, says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina. “It’s kind of a mess,” she says, “and these policies are constantly in flux.”

Some beliefs are also so deeply held that the distinction between what constitutes “censorship” versus suspending an account for violating a platform’s rules almost becomes meaningless. For example, a recent poll from Ipsos and NPR found that two-thirds of Republican respondents agree with the false claim that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.”

The censorship assertion is an enticing pitch, though. When Mr. Pavlovski tried to raise funds years ago, “I got laughed out of the room,” he says. Last May, a venture capital firm co-founded by author and Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance took a stake in Rumble. Then came the SPAC deal, which will give it access to US$300-million in cash upon closing, plus another US$100-million raised from as yet undisclosed private investors. Mr. Pavlovski will remain CEO and retain 85-per-cent voting control.

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After the first round of funding, Rumble opened an office in Florida and purchased a Patreon-like site called Locals, co-founded by Mr. Rubin. The next tranche of cash will allow for more ambitious expansion plans. More than half the money from the SPAC deal will be used to lure popular personalities to Rumble. “We want to bring in a lot of different players in a lot of different verticals,” Mr. Pavlovski says, not just politics.

He wants to strike contracts and guarantee a monthly minimum payment for creators to post exclusively to Rumble before uploading elsewhere. The company already has such an agreement with British comedian Russell Brand. His monologues aren’t overtly political, but his content feels at home there – elites are taking over, Big Pharma wants people to stay sick, the media benefits by dividing the public.

Last year, Rumble also signed a deal with Glenn Greenwald, who posts his videos to the site first. (He told The Washington Post the company pays top creators in the mid-six-figure range.) Mr. Greenwald, too, was motivated by the supposed restrictiveness of mainstream platforms. “It is impossible to overstate how repressive Google has become in its censorship regime on YouTube,” he tweeted a few months after joining.

So what is it people so badly want to say on Rumble they can’t say anywhere else?

In some cases, not much. Many creators still post to YouTube – even Rumble investor Dave Rubin. (On The Rubin Report, he criticizes “wokeness,” “critical race theory,” and other hobby horses of the right.) “I’m not going to sit here and pretend YouTube’s reach isn’t massive,” he says. “I want more people to find me there.” Maybe he’ll be popular enough to post exclusively to Rumble, Mr. Rubin says, but not yet.

Others have actually been banished from YouTube, such as Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser. In the wake of the U.S. Capitol riots, YouTube removed the account for his show, Bannon’s War Room, after it repeatedly alleged widespread electoral fraud. His Rumble channel has roughly 630,000 subscribers, and his videos are often among the day’s most popular. In addition to sowing doubt about electoral integrity, Mr. Bannon’s show promotes dubious theories about vaccines and COVID-19.

One of the starkest differences between Rumble and YouTube is apparent when searching for content about the pandemic. YouTube turns up clips from mainstream news organizations, whereas Rumble surfaces videos on the first page about the “shocking number” of deaths caused by vaccines, and another claiming vaccines are part of an “extinction agenda.” In one video, which has nearly two million views, a cardiologist claims mass vaccination is a “horrendous idea” and that Americans know “the vaccine is not safe.”

Last year, the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate released a study on 12 of the most prominent anti-vaxxers on social media. Other platforms have attempted to limit the spread of misinformation from these individuals by removing content or banning accounts. On Rumble, the top two results for Joseph Mercola, an American osteopathic physician and No. 1 on the anti-vax list, are interviews on Mr. Bannon’s show in which he says the people who developed and approved COVID-19 vaccines should be in jail, and another in which he says vaccines will kill more people than the virus itself.

Facebook and YouTube, meanwhile, removed accounts associated with Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaxxer. Mr. Bigtree is still active on Rumble with 39,000 subscribers, far less than what he used to have on Facebook. “They might be a small platform if you compare it to YouTube or Facebook, but they’re also a platform that is at the heart of conspiracy content,” says Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who tracks extremism. (Mr. Pavlovski brushes off criticism from the think tank because it has received funding from YouTube.)

The site is home to outlandish but popular personalities, such as bounty hunter-turned-commentator Stew Peters, who has been banned from Twitter but has 290,000 subscribers on Rumble. In a single week in November, Mr. Peters interviewed a naturopath who said vaccines contain the Ebola virus and induce AIDS; claimed authorities are covering up side effects; and compared vaccinating children to “marching them into Holocaust ovens.” According to November data from SimilarWeb, “stew peters show” was among the top five keyword searches used to land on Rumble, and his account is among a list of featured channels on the home page.

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When I ask Mr. Pavlovski about Rumble’s content guidelines, he seems more eager to attack his much larger competitors. “They have algorithms and artificial intelligence that are incentivized to promote content that is extreme,” he says. “The more extreme it is, the more engagement it gets, the more they pop it up.” Rumble’s feed is chronological, and its video recommendations are based on keywords.

Those recommendations can still lead to some dark places. When I searched for “vaccine” in November, the first result was a clip of an interview with Dr. Fauci with a blatantly misleading title stating he admits vaccines don’t work as advertised and those who got the shot are in “great danger.” (He does not say any of that.) From there, one of the videos Rumble recommended featured Alex Jones saying vaccines provide no protection, and that government and public-health officials are an “enemy force.”

I ask Mr. Pavlovski whether the absence of algorithms absolves Rumble of responsibility to monitor content more closely. “We’re a very small company,” he says. “To ask us to be experts in medical fields, to ask us to be experts in politics, to ask us to be experts in any field, for that matter – there’s no way I could do that as a startup.” But surely one doesn’t need a PhD to know that vaccines are safe at this point, I suggest. “The problem with that is how does a company like Rumble accomplish watching millions of videos?” he says. “I need billions of dollars to hire every expert on the planet. That’s not something I want to do, and I think it’s careless for you to expect me to be that expert.”

The attitude is simply shrugging off responsibility, according to Ms. Squire at Elon University. “I’m just kind of losing my patience with the ‘We’re not big enough argument,’” she says. “You’re in this business, you’re cashing the cheques every month. Meanwhile, you’re outsourcing your problems to the rest of us to deal with.”

Rumble currently has around 50 content moderators to review videos. Some are outsourced positions, though Mr. Pavlovski won’t say how many. That number will grow along with the company, he says, but there are already signs Rumble will face challenges. Among the accounts on Rumble is one run by Nick Fuentes, a far-right agitator who has been booted from every major platform, including YouTube, Facebook and even PayPal. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mr. Fuentes has espoused racist and antisemitic rhetoric, and helped foment the “Stop the Steal” movement, which staged rallies to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. He later set up his own streaming site for his show, America First, and some videos are cross-posted to Rumble.

Mr. Pavlovski said he’d never heard of Nick Fuentes. Later, I flagged a video in which Mr. Fuentes claimed that immigration is a genocide being perpetrated on white people comparable to what “allegedly” happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany. The company responded by removing the video but didn’t say whether it had reviewed any of Mr. Fuentes’s other videos. “When we are made aware of content that violates our policies, like YouTube, we take appropriate actions,” Mr. Pavlovski wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Fuentes’s account, with hours and hours of content, remains active.

After Rumble announced its SPAC merger in December, I met with Mr. Pavlovski again. He’d been in Florida, looking to hire 25 or so people for the new U.S. office. Rumble was attracting applicants from all the Big Tech companies, he said, and he was shocked to learn the high salaries some were earning.

In the meantime, he was scouting new opportunities. Rumble already owns some of its servers, with plans to own as many as it can so nobody can kick it offline. Mr. Pavlovski wants to offer cloud services to others to provide them with the same assurance. Recently, Rumble secured such an arrangement with Donald Trump’s latest venture, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which plans to launch a social-media platform called Truth Social.

Mr. Pavlovski had also been thinking more about Rumble’s content guidelines, saying they need to more concisely and transparently define what constitutes “racism,” for example. But he wasn’t planning major changes. “The last thing I want to do is move the goalposts,” he says. I asked whether he ever feels backed into a corner. He spent years waging a lonely quest to build a YouTube competitor, and has finally found a group of investors and users willing to join him, even if they’re motivated by more overtly political concerns. If he does tighten Rumble’s content guidelines, he risks losing users. But he said he’d already fielded complaints that Rumble was too restrictive, which told him he was finding a balance.

Mr. Pavlovski went on to say he’d met a lot of people across the political spectrum over the past couple of years, all of whom have more in common than they realize. He pulled out his phone and read a series of tweets he was planning to post. “In time, entities with missions like Rumble, dedicated not to a specific ideology, but to permitting dissent and free thought, will unite more and more people,” he read. It was something he truly believed, he said.

In the days after he posted the tweets, among the top videos on Rumble included Dan Bongino excoriating a “sleazeball Democrat,” a compilation of feminists getting “owned,” and a conservative commentator who “DESTROYS” the “white privilege myth.” Whatever unity Mr. Pavlovski foresees is, for now, a long way off.

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