I Traded My News Apps for Rumble, the Right-Wing YouTube. Here’s What I Saw.
Founded in 2013 by Canadian entrepreneur Christopher Pavlovski, the platform Rumble was designed as a home for independent creators who felt crowded out on YouTube. It took a hard right turn around the time of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, when social networks and YouTube cracked down on users who violated their rules.
The New York Times
As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: “We are the media now.”
The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.
In its place, they argue, are right-wing digital creators who have found hordes of fans online. Rumble, for instance, is tiny compared with YouTube, but it is a primary source of news for millions of Americans, according to Pew Research Center. On election night, its active viewership topped out at more than two million, and the company said in a statement that it averaged more than 67 million monthly active users in the final quarter of 2024.
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