According to new reports, it seems that YouTube alternative video site Rumble has been banned in Russia.
The new ban of the video platform has been confirmed by some users on Reddit and anti-censorship site Reclaim the Net, as well as by Rumble’s CEO himself, Chris Pavlovski.
“Russia has officially blocked Rumble because we refused to comply with their censorship demands,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said. “Ironically, YouTube is still operating in Russia, and everyone needs to ask what Russian demands Google and YouTube are complying with?”
But, what exactly were these supposed demands that Russia made? Pavlovski explained in a recent talk:
“Rumble had received multiple requests from the Russian government to censor various channels, which did not violate their terms of service,” Pavlovski said in an X spaces talk. “One of the accounts was with respect to marijuana, another seemed to be like some kind of conspiracy channel… And the other channel seemed to be an Arabic channel that was political…”
While Rumble famously cut access to the entire country of France a few years ago when France threatened to ban their service for refusing to block Russian feeds due to the Ukraine invasion, Russia cutting Rumble off first seems to be a new precedent for the site.
What’s more concerning is the lack of coverage of this incident by the American news media. When Rumble blocked France for refusing to bow to the French government, sites like The Atlantic refused to hide their bias, rushing to cover the event with inciteful headlines such as “alt-right website caters to Russia” and other such libel that has since been taken down.
CEO Chris Pavlovski has also noticed this, and he’s voiced quite a concern about the lack of coverage in another statement.
“Not a single mainstream news source has covered the fact that Russia has blocked Rumble, and it’s been over 24 hours,” Pavlovski said. “Rumble is a public company trading with a market cap near $2 billion dollars under the ticker symbol $RUM, and corporate media doesn’t think this is important.”
Rumble continues to hold true to their word by refusing to kowtow to any government requests, so we’ll see if that stance changes somewhere down the line. For now, Russian users are having to seek out VPN services in order to access content on Rumble.
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