How Rumble went from a family-friendly Canadian startup to a megaphone for U.S. election deniers

Steven Crowder has big plans for election night. The far-right commentator says he will livestream his show on the video-sharing platform Rumble until a winner is declared.

Crowder, who routinely airs debunked claims of voter fraud, believes that could take days or weeks, potentially making his the “longest-lasting election night livestream in internet history.”

He is promising the Nov. 5 show will highlight “election anomalies coast-to-coast,” reported to him by “undercover” journalists and volunteer poll watchers.

The livestream will also feature appearances by other pundits known for spreading electoral disinformation, including Alex Jones, Dan Bongino and Tim Pool — all of whom have their own popular channels on Rumble, with a collective following of 3.8 million.

Rumble founder and CEO Chris Pavlovski said in a news release his company is “excited to capitalize” on this kind of content.

Non-partisan election watchdog groups in the U.S. have been increasingly vocal this electoral cycle about efforts by right-wing and other pro-Trump activists to interfere with the voting process, which have included documented attempts to pare down voter rolls and influence the certification process. 

This interference campaign is fuelled by the rampant disinformation found on social media sites like Rumble, said Ishan Mehta, director of the media and democracy program at Common Cause, a voting rights advocacy group.

“I think myths and disinformation are the main root causes of many of the problems we see with our electoral process,” Mehta said.

While much of the recent concern has been directed at X, the site formerly known as Twitter run by Elon Musk, an avid supporter of Republican candidate Donald Trump, Rumble has quietly emerged as an important player in the disinformation ecosystem.

“I don’t know that there’s been enough attention on Rumble and its role overall in this election,” said Katie Harbath, who worked on public policy and elections at Facebook before starting a tech consulting firm.

• You can send CBC’s investigative journalists information confidentially through email or SecureDrop

Started in Toronto in 2013, Rumble was once mainly known as a site where you could find wholesome pet videos. 

But as the company struggled to establish a foothold in a digital economy dominated by big tech, it was courted by pro-Trump financiers, such as Peter Thiel.

With their backing, Pavlovski transformed the site into a platform where extremists, conspiracy theorists and election deniers who were unwelcome elsewhere on the internet can flourish. 

A safe space for your cockatoo

Before launching Rumble, Pavlovski ran a humour website called Jokeroo, which he started from his parents’ home in Brampton, Ont., in 2001.

It was one of the few video-centric sites online at the time, predating YouTube by four years.

Visitors to Jokeroo were enticed to upload content for the chance “to become famous overnight!”

LISTEN | How Rumble became the platform for creators banned elsewhere:

Rumble may be a lesser-known social media site, but it’s been gaining momentum as a platform for content creators banned by bigger sites. Nora Young, from the CBC’s Visual Investigations Unit, digs into the Canadian-founded video platform’s soaring popularity.

By 2010, the business had moved into a small office in downtown Toronto. Pavlovski had it equipped with Ping-Pong and pool tables, giving it a Silicon Valley startup vibe, one former employee recalled.

“Chris was very ambitious. It was his dream to create a rival to YouTube,” said Kevin Johnson, who worked in sales for Jolted Media Group, Jokeroo’s parent company. 

YouTube had leapfrogged Jokeroo and was, at that point, already a behemoth, charting more than two billion views per day.

But Pavlovski had been experimenting with different ways to monetize user-generated content by splitting ad revenue with the creators.  

His plan was to compete with YouTube by appealing to the smaller creators on the platform, who he thought were being ignored as it became populated by mega-influencers.

Rumble went online in 2013 as a site that would either pay cash upfront for select videos or help creators license their creations and recoup the ad revenues.

“We are democratizing an idea of distribution and monetization of video content for the creators,” Pavlovski said in a 2015 interview.

Rumble’s more generous revenue-sharing model attracted creators like Rebecca Stout, a retired writer from Chattanooga, Tenn., with bylines in Modern Ferret and Ferrets for Dummies, who had been posting animal videos on YouTube. 

On Rumble, several videos of her pet cockatoo — such as 2017’s “Cockatoo Becomes Thrilled When Owner Arrives At Home” — went viral, attracting millions of views. 

“I decided to stick with them because they were making me good money,” said Stout, who estimates she’s made around $36,000 US from her Rumble videos. “Rumble had this big support system [for creators]. They weren’t distant like other companies.” 

Pavlovski vaunted his platform’s preference for warm and fuzzy content. At a conference in 2018, he derided YouTube’s lax moderation policies that incentivized creators to do the “next crazy thing.”

Rumble, he said, had stricter procedures in place that blocked unsavoury videos from being uploaded to the site, making it safer for brands to advertise there. 

“Who doesn’t want to be with a cute family moment, stuff that you typically see in America’s Funniest Home Videos, things that are family-friendly, that are inspiring,” Pavlovski said in 2018.

Rumble was a Canadian startup success story in its early years and was listed among the country’s fastest-growing companies that year. 

But revenues dropped by nearly 80 per cent the following year as it struggled to dent YouTube’s dominance of the ad market, according to a company document filed in Ontario court.

Big money, big change

When governments began imposing COVID lockdowns in March 2020, Rumble only had around one million active monthly users. 

By the end of the year, that number had suddenly soared to 21 million, according to its 2023 annual report.

The spike coincided with attempts by the major social media platforms — including YouTube — to crack down on misinformation around the 2020 U.S. election.

WATCH | CNN fact checker Daniel Dale explains the difficulty of confronting rampant misinformation in the 2024 U.S. election:

CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale joins Power & Politics to explain the importance and difficulty of tracking lies during a live presidential debate.

That prompted many big name right-wing influencers who saw their accounts demonetized, or shut down entirely, to turn to Rumble and its generous revenue-sharing model, including former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ex-congressman Ron Paul. 

With its user base surging among conservative audiences, Rumble soon attracted investors with close ties to Trump.

In May 2021, Narya Capital – a venture capital firm co-founded by the Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance – and Thiel, a Republican financier, announced they were making a major investment in Rumble, one that reportedly valued the company at $500 million US.

Within a year, Rumble had moved its headquarters near Sarasota, Fla., and went public with the help of Howard Lutnick, CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and another Trump-supporting billionaire. 

As Pavlovski rang the bell at Nasdaq Tower to open trading on Sept. 22, 2022, he too had become a billionaire. 

Rumble has used its newfound cash to sign content deals with some of the most controversial figures on the internet, including a reported $9-million US contract with the misogynistic influencer and accused sex offender Andrew Tate.

“All of a sudden they were the focus and everything else just got pushed to the back burner,” Stout said of the new wave of influencers on the site. 

“It went from this positive, wholesome place to this really negative, angry place.” 

It has also welcomed a litany of videos promoting false claims about the recent election cycles in the U.S.

WATCH | How election denial went mainstream in America:

Michigan isn’t just a crucial battleground state, it’s also become the epicentre of election denial after a 2020 counting error was torqued into ‘proof’ of widespread voter fraud. CBC’s Nick Purdon goes there to learn more about the fallout and how election officials are fighting to restore trust in the system at the heart of American democracy.

Rumble, for example, released the film 2,000 Mules — which maintains, erroneously, that the last presidential election was rigged by illegal voting — through its subscription service.

“As Rumble has matured, it’s developed what I feel is a really clear editorial voice,” said Jared Holt, an expert on extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a U.K.-based, non-profit research group.

“It’s an editorial voice that is pretty conspiratorial, pretty sympathetic to far-right figures and, of course, unabashedly pro-Trump.”

In the face of calls to better moderate content, Pavlovski has responded by invoking the free speech arguments common to other tech entrepreneurs, such as Musk.

“Our mission to protect a free and open internet is our North Star,” Pavlovski told a congressional committee this summer.

Minimal content oversight is now baked into Rumble’s business model, a significant reversal from its earlier commitment to protecting advertisers.

In a lawsuit against a global coalition of advertisers, Rumble said it “forgoes spending significant resources on brand safety efforts,” the measures that would prevent an ad appearing alongside objectionable content. The company says those savings allow it to sell ads at a more competitive rate.

Pavlovski did not respond directly to a request for comment from CBC News.

Instead, he posted a screen grab of the request on his X feed, adding: “The irony of a story on misinformation, pushed by the @CBC, which is funded by Trudeau’s government, is almost too much to believe.

“The best antidote to misinformation is more information, which is exactly what [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and the CBC do not want.”

He declined a subsequent request to sit down for an interview with CBC News, which is publicly funded through an annual appropriation of funds approved by Parliament.

Even though major advertisers, such as Burger King, have balked at Rumble’s ambivalence to brand-safety concerns, its revenues have increased since going public, from $39.4 million US in 2022 to a forecast of $107 million US by the end of this fiscal year. 

Election danger

In addition to advertising, Rumble also makes money by providing cloud computing services. 

Its first notable client was Truth Social, the social media platform Trump helped create after he was removed from Twitter.

By entering the cloud-service business, Rumble says it can ensure avowedly conservative companies maintain internet access in the event they are taken down over controversial content, something it calls being “cancel-culture free.”

“The vision here is to create a self-sustainable ecosystem that can host this kind of material online,” said Holt.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riots, large tech companies were unwilling, for a period, to host content that was seen as contributing to political violence, which included false claims about the election.

Four years later, such claims can circulate largely unimpeded on sites like Rumble, before migrating to the mainstream.

“It is a place where you can sort of see what sells and then bring it over to the larger audience,” said Mehta. 

The danger is that, in a highly charged political landscape, false claims about the electoral process and the results could encourage harassment of poll workers, said Harbath, the former Facebook public policy director.

In Georgia, poll managers in some counties have already been equipped with panic buttons. In Arizona, one hotly contested county has hired armed guards to protect its election headquarters.

Rumble says it has strict moderation policies that ban the incitement of violence, as well as the promotion of racism and antisemitism, though media observers have repeatedly found xenophobic and antisemitic videos on the platform.

And unlike other tech companies, Harbath said, Rumble doesn’t appear to have any policies about protecting election integrity, such as ensuring accurate information about when and where to vote.

“It is a platform to absolutely keep an eye on,” she said.

“What we might be seeing here in the United States, and what we might see unfold over the next couple of weeks, could be an indicator of what Canada might see next year in its own elections.”