The second Republican presidential debate will air Wednesday on Fox Business Network and Univision, but the exclusive online livestream will take place on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and sometimes promoting far-right extremism, bigotry , election disinformation and conspiracy theories.

By bringing viewers to Rumble to watch the second GOP debate, as it did the first last month, the Republican National Committee is driving potential voters to a site teeming with content that bends the rules of more mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Earlier this year, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said that using Rumble instead of YouTube as a livestream partner was a decision aimed at “getting away from Big Tech.”

When asked about the criticism of the platform, the RNC said in an email that hate, bigotry and violence are unfortunately rampant on every social media platform, and the RNC fully condemns this, but the RNC does not moderate any content or pages outside of ours .

Founded in 2013, Rumble prides itself on being immune to cancel culture. The website says that everyone benefits from having access to more ideas, diverse opinions and dialogue.

That approach has made the site extremely popular in recent years, as many conservatives have looked for alternative social media companies that don’t delete their posts or suspend their accounts for false or inflammatory content. The company, which went public in 2022, is backed by conservative donors such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

How Biden plans to counter Trump and the GOP debate

According to its most recent quarterly filing, it has grown to an average of 44 million monthly active users. By comparison, its closest mainstream cousin, Google-owned video service YouTube, has billions of monthly logged-in users, a spokesperson said.

It’s difficult to gauge how much the debates have affected Rumble’s user base because the company hasn’t released that data yet. But it’s clear the company’s reach is growing. Desktop and mobile web data from the research firm Zekerweb, which does not include traffic from apps, shows that the platform had about double the number of unique visitors in August than the year before.

Rumble’s web traffic is also consistently much higher than that of other right-wing social media platforms, such as Truth Social, Gab or Gettr, according to Similarwebs’ analysis.

Politicians have taken notice. Since the start of the Republican presidential primaries, several candidates have started posting their campaign videos on the platform, including the governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and current GOP frontrunner, former President Trump. Democratic challenger and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also has a profile on the site.

Real-life ‘succession’ as Lachlan Murdoch consolidates his position on Fox and News Corp.

But as Rumble’s influence has grown, the platform continues to be overwhelmed by content that denies the results of the 2020 election, advances bigoted views on race and gender, and promotes harmful conspiracy theories.

In the weeks since the first debate, the top-performing content leaderboard, which is prominently displayed on Rumble’s homepage, has regularly included multiple accounts promoting QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory that has led to violent incidents and deaths.

An election search on the platform turns up videos that falsely claim that the so-called deep state rigged the 2020 presidential election and that the 2024 election has already been tampered with.

An analysis last year by NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, found that nearly half of the videos Rumble suggested in response to searches for general election-related terms came from unreliable sources.

Rumble’s press team said the company was not responsible for the content of the leaderboard and search features. In an email response, they said the leaderboard rankings were generated based on the most liked recent videos on the site.

Rumble is a platform and does not create content, just as other social media platforms host content without producing or endorsing it,” the email said.

The company’s response pointed out that even YouTube has announced it will no longer take action on claims of fraud in the 2020 election. However, unlike Rumble, YouTube has said it will continue to remove content that tries to sway voters. mislead in the 2024 elections.

Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, has also quietly rolled back some of its safeguards against election misinformation in recent years. But it has continued several other initiatives, such as its third-party fact-checking program, which enlists the help of news media to investigate the veracity of popular falsehoods spreading on Facebook or Instagram. The Associated Press is part of that effort.

YouTube allows former President Trump’s channel to upload videos ahead of the 2024 election

In addition to claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories, Rumble has also come under fire for being slow to respond to hate speech and calls for violence.

Ahead of the first GOP debate last month, the live feed for the GOP’s official pre-show at Rumble was flooded with racist slurs and bigoted remarks. The episode was subsequently hidden from the public. The RNC said the video was removed to direct users to the live stream of the debate and avoid confusing viewers with multiple videos.

Trump’s campaign videos on Rumble have also sparked violent and hateful responses from users, including a threatening comment on a recent video calling for President Biden’s hanging. Other comments on his recent videos told Trump to execute Democrats and suggested someone build lots of gallows.

Rumble said it removed these comments in response to AP’s investigation. It says the posts violate the platform’s content policy, which prohibits incitement to violence, illegal content, racism, anti-Semitism, promotion of terrorist groups (designated by the US and Canadian governments) and copyright infringement, as well as many other restrictions.

The Texas shooter’s ‘RWDS’ patch has been linked to far-right extremists

Later, Rumble founder Chris Pavlovski responded to the AP’s investigation in a message on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, saying the messages were just a few responses out of millions.

It’s difficult to say for sure whether Rumble has more hateful, extreme or conspiracy theory content than competitors like YouTube, said Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that tracks online hate, disinformation and extremism. . But he said Rumble uniquely appeals to creators who create that type of content.

It has managed to reach a rare sweet spot on the alt platform, he said. “It has enough loose content guidelines and a large enough potential audience size to make it worthwhile for a creator to work there.

The RNC has not yet announced whether it will partner with Rumble for future debates. Holt said the partnership already legitimizes the platform in the eyes of many viewers.

This RNC streaming deal with Rumble will certainly drive more people to the platform, where they will likely find extreme and misleading content and perhaps more importantly, almost no content that would counter it with different perspectives or corrections, he said.