This is a trending question, since a growing number of video content creators have grown fed up with YouTube deleting videos and channels and are looking for alternative places to upload their videos. Rumble is one of the sites that has soared in popularity recently, with many millions of users switching over.

But with censorship seemingly everywhere now, it is difficult to know who to trust, even among alternative hosting platforms. Who’s to say that some of these sites won’t take videos down at some point? Where does Rumble stand on this? Are they really a video sharing platform that can be trusted going forward?

We can only really go with the publicly stated positions of the people running Rumble, plus their track record and observed behavior, and on all these counts, the picture actually look good for trusting Rumble:

Under the present ownership and management, all the evidence supports Rumble being a platform that can be trusted to protect free speech for content creators. They remain strongly committed to freedom of expression and will not take down any content unless it is obscene or violates clear laws that oblige them to remove the content.

Apart from that, publishers are free to express their views on the platforms, and there is zero evidence of any kind of ideological censorship applied by other video platforms like YouTube, where videos and even entire channels are deleted because the content does not align with the political or ideological views of those running the company.

Rumble has been around since 2013, and their position has remained consistent since then, which further counts in their favor. Let’s take a deeper dive into the publicly stated positions of their CEO on free speech, as well as their actual content policies.

Rumble is Openly Committed to Free Speech

We should be clear that the position of Rumble as stated on their website, and by their CEO Chris Pavlovski in interviews, has been consistently in favor of free speech and anti-censorship. They are not in agreement with what the big tech media companies are doing taking down videos and channels, and are committed to providing an alternative platform where dissenting voices can express their views.

For this reason, they have become a popular alternative platform for conservative voices especially such Dinesh D’Souza and Sean Hannity.

See the in depth embedded interview below with Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski, where they go into the issue of free speech online, and how their platform is committed to protecting it.

 

Here are some crucial takeaways from the video:

• Since it’s founding in 2013, Rumble has never received any financing from Silicon Valley
• They claim to have largely avoided any venture capitalist investment (but not totally – they have received investments from venture capitalists like Narya and Peter Thiel – more on this below).
• The board is made up from a combination of independent American and Canadian investors. See here.
• A strong ideology of standing up for grass roots content creators (“the little guy”), and strong independence from big tech and Silicon Valley that has remained since it’s founding.
• Political dialogue will never be censored as long as long it follows the law.
• Monetization options that allow grass roots creators to get wider distribution for their content, and then ensure they get adequate compensation for their content being viewed.
• A strong desire to actually answer to real market forces in terms of video content; in other words, actually giving people the content they want to see, not what they think people should see (which is what the big players so often do).
• Rumble will never auto-unsubscribe users from channel, as YouTube has been doing. Subscribers to a channel will always get videos from those channels in their feed, unfiltered and uncensored. No algorithmic manipulation of searches or suggested feeds. Users will get what they search for.
• See part 2 of the above embedded interview for more on the Rumble app and monetization.

“Rumble was built on the belief that all video content creators should be given equal opportunity to freely express themselves and reach a broad audience across the globe, all while maximizing their revenue. This belief has been evident since we established the company and is at the core of what we do”

Rumble CEO – Jack Pavlovski – see here

Rumble’s Content Policies

Let’s be more specific though and actually provide an overview of Rumble’s actual content and conduct rules, taken from their Terms & Conditions page.

Basically, it appears that their content policy follows the law rather than subjective ideological opinion, with some obvious further additions in there that make total sense.

Basically, the following type of content is NOT allowed on Rumble:

• Pornography
• Racist content
• Harassment
• Disseminating libelous or slanderous information about others (provably false), and/or violating privacy.
• Animal cruelty
• Anything that provides instruction on doing clearly illegal things, especially with regards to terrorism, weapon assembly or use, and so on.
• Anything else that is depicting or providing instruction on doing things which are clearly violations of the law and/or FCC regulations.
• They will also take down content that is a clear violation of Copyright rules. See their policy on this here.
• See the screenshot of the relevant section below:

These policies are completely understandable and are simply following the letter of the law. If what you upload is illegal following the strict letter of the law, then it will be taken down, which is fair.

There is nothing in their terms that suggests the same kind of vague, subjectively applied Terms of Service that platforms like YouTube have been implementing to delete content they ideologically disagree with.

In this sense, Rumble is a much fairer platform where creators who have beliefs outside the mainstream can express their views without the same threat of censorship as the Silicon Valley Big Tech companies.

Rumble Standing Up Against Calls For Censorship

Another thing that stands in Rumble’s favor is their recent refusal to back down to demands from the UK parliament to remove monetization on Russell Brand’s channel in the light of allegations that surfaced against him in 2023.

Rumble took the position of “innocent until proven guilty” and the Rumble CEO refused to demonetize his channel while the allegations still remained as allegations and aren’t proven in a court of law.

Rumble’s Lawsuit Against Google

Another important stance Rumble are taking on free speech and competition in the video market is in actually suing YouTube’s parent company Google in an Anti-trust suit worth over $2 billion.

In the suit, they argue that Google has been artificially manipulating search results to steer customers away from rival platforms like Rumble and onto it’s own platform YouTube instead. See the video below from Rumble CEO Pavlovski for an explanation of this.

“If you Google ‘funny dogs on Rumble’, you’ll get ‘funny dogs on YouTube’.

Note – We originally embedded the video above from YouTube but, to demonstrate the point on censorship perfectly, it was taken down, so we’ve had to re-embed a video from Rumble instead.

This is a pervasive trend when using the big tech mainstream platforms like YouTube – they are constantly blurring the line between delivering what the user is asking for, and what they think the customer should (or should not be) viewing. This is injecting ideology into how they deliver their service, which is not what search engines are supposed to do.

In any event Rumble is convincingly arguing that because Google has manipulated it’s results to steer traffic away from the Rumble platform, this has caused them significant financial loss, in terms of lost customers and revenue. We’ll see where this lawsuit goes, but in any event, it’s good to see Rumble fighting back against manipulating of search results by the big players.

Beware The Peter Thiel/Narya Investment

It’s fair to say Rumble has remained largely free from any big tech/venture capital/Silicon Valley investment influence. But not totally.

Back in 2021, Cincinnati based investment firm Narya and billionaire investor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel also  put a sizeable investment into Rumble (see their official press release on this here).

Just being honest, this isn’t really what you’d call “grassroots” investors. They are more on the big tech/corporate side for sure.

But on the other hand, this investment was way back in 2021, and since then, there hasn’t been any noticeable change in the way Rumble operates in terms of content policies and free speech. It’s as free and open a platform as it was back then – nothing has changed other than the platform growing substantially and building out it’s feature base to try and be more of a match for established platforms like YouTube.

So whilst this corporate/venture capital influence is there in the sense of the investment, there’s no sign it’s affected Rumble’s policies as of yet. But it’s advised to keep it in mind and keep an eye on it.

Remember that YouTube was also relatively free in it’s early days, then when the corporate investment and ownership passed a certain point around 2013/2014, that’s when the platform started censoring and restricting content more. Let’s hope Rumble stays truly independent and doesn’t follow this same path in the coming years.

Beware of the Apple & Google Connection

We should throw up a note of caution here, which doesn’t so much cast doubt on the trustworthiness of Rumble themselves, but on the trustworthiness of the big tech players who are currently hosting their app.

The Rumble is currently hosted on both the Google and Apple app stores, recently skyrocketing to the top of the download charts on these stores as millions of users switched over, fed up with big tech censorship of sites like YouTube.

However, this leaves app users potentially vulnerable to the app being deleted from these stores, as happened when Google and Apple deleted the Parler app off their stores in early 2021, and Amazon also pulled them off their servers, effectively taking the service completely offline.

The mistake Parler made here is in leaving themselves totally dependent on, and vulnerable to, the ideological whims of big tech players, by depending on them to run their service. Also, Parler was solely app based and did not even have a desktop version, leaving them without alternatives.

Hopefully, Rumble do not make this mistake and remain self sufficient and independent of big tech in terms of their servers. Also, they DO have a desktop version that works perfectly well just like YouTube, so they do have an alternative to fall back on in case their app gets deleted by Google or Apple, which given the recent behavior of these companies remains a possibility.

Benefits of Rumble

For content creators thinking of switching to Rumble, let’s run through some of the major benefits of the platform which can make them a viable alternative to sites like YouTube:

• Free to join and upload (more advanced paid options are available). No need to register through Facebook, Google, or any other platform (though you can if you want to). You can join directly on Rumble.
• Non intrusive and non invasive sign up process. Minimal person details required; just need an account name, password and a few other details to get started.
• Monetization options (no watch time requirement like YouTube – you can get going straight away).
• Unbiased algorithms ensure that popular viral videos will get good distribution. No middle-man advertizer influence deciding what videos are “suitable” or not. Gives a chance to grass roots creators to get noticed.
• Reliable uploads and streaming – a good bonus as other alternative platforms like BitChute have been struggling at times with upload and streaming reliability. Click here for help with any rare streaming issues.
• Videos are fully embeddable on websites just like YouTube ones.
• See our full article on alternative video hosting sites for more on Rumble and other alternatives like BitChute, including pros and cons.

Conclusions

The bottom line on this is that with the current ownership and management, there is full confidence that Rumble is trustworthy and will remain committed to free speech going forward. Their position has remained consistently pro free speech, and there is zero evidence of them applying the kind of selective, ideological censorship that YouTube does.

In short, everything looks good for Rumble right now in terms of free speech. They are a video sharing platform that can be trusted.

Of course, as with anything in this space though, it’s very important to keep an eye out for changes in ownership and management that could mean this position shifts. Hopefully, the current management of Rumble are well aware of this themselves, and will be resisting any efforts from big tech to buy them out and turn them into a another free speech censoring “mainstream” platform.

Click here to get started on the Rumble platform (free to join and many different account options available).