Video platform Rumble will pay eight well-known “thought leaders,” including former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and firebrand journalist Glenn Greenwald, to create exclusive content in an attempt to attract a more mainstream audience and compete with YouTube.
Rumble, which has billed itself as a platform for free speech and is popular with conservatives, hopes to diversify its consumer base by drawing in new users that are anti-establishment but not as right-leaning. Gabbard and Greenwald come from liberal backgrounds.
Greenwald and Gabbard will be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to create videos exclusively for Rumble for at least two hours before being able to post that content on other platforms.
Both will focus some of their content on Big Tech companies — their censorship of online speech and the accusations that they engage in monopolistic behavior.
“One of the interesting things about Gabbard and Greenwald is their focus on free speech and civil discourse and debate,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski told the Washington Examiner.
“We at Rumble don’t believe in discriminating against certain content, and so they help drive our message. They’re very aligned with the mission of our platform,” Pavlovski said.
BREAKING UP BIG TECH WOULD ADDRESS CONSERVATIVE FEARS OF BIAS, TOP DEMOCRAT SAYS
Other prominent online personalities that Rumble is bringing on board as part of this new initiative include comedian Bridget Phetasy, independent content creator Matt Orfalea, online provocateur and former journalist Siraj Hashmi, business development manager Mujahed Kobbe, and left-leaning opinion writers Shant Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani.
Thanks in part to its free-speech focus, Rumble has experienced over a 25-fold increase in viewership over the past year during the pandemic, with over 25 million users every month, up from just 1 million users a month last summer.
Unlike most social media giants, such as YouTube and Facebook, it does not remove health-related misinformation, such as inaccurate information discrediting the COVID-19 vaccines or the use of masks to stop the spread of the virus. The platform does, however, ban racism and hate speech.
Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the founder of the Intercept, a liberal publication, often expresses controversial and inflammatory opinions on social media and wants the ability to keep doing so thanks to Rumble.
“Many writers, from across the political spectrum, have been censored or excluded from mainstream platforms and Rumble gives these voices a chance to express themselves without having to worry about baseless attacks by the government or other self-appointed gatekeepers,” Greenwald said in a statement on Thursday.
Prominent examples of censorship on Big Tech platforms recently include: former President Donald Trump’s widespread social media bans, the suppression of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election, social media platform Parler being banned by Amazon, Apple, and Google earlier this year, and Google suppressing conservative news outlets in search results in the past few years.
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Democrats and liberals, however, challenge conservative allegations of online bias, citing studies that have concluded that social media companies don’t discriminate against conservatives and that the anti-conservative censorship claims are a form of disinformation or falsehood.
