US Senator for Kentucky Rand Paul has announced that he’s beginning his exodus from Big Tech and no longer posting to YouTube “unless it is to criticize them or announce that viewers can see my content on rumble.com”
Paul said he made the decision after coming to the realization that his relationship with YouTube is “dysfunctional” because the platform’s “fact-checkers” censor his “fully sourced, fact-based content.”
He added that he’s starting with YouTube because “they’re the worst censors” and noted that YouTube has censored his videos that dispute the effectiveness of cloth masks, even though these cite studies and scientific sources. Paul also pointed to YouTube’s February 2020 censorship of his speech in the Senate which mentioned the name of the Trump impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
Paul’s commitment to the free speech video sharing platform Rumble follows him promoting it last year. Since he started posting to Rumble, Paul has already amassed 394,000 subscribers and more than a million total views.
Paul is one of several big names to embrace Rumble with political commentator Dan Bongino, journalist Glenn Greenwald, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and many others posting regular and exclusive content to the video-sharing platform.
Interest in alt-tech platforms such as Rumble and GETTR, a free speech platform that says it’s “founded on the principles of free speech,” has surged over the last few days after the tech giant Twitter permanently banned several high profile figures, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and immunologist and virologist Dr. Robert Malone, for their comments about coronavirus vaccines.
While Big Tech platforms have ramped up their censorship of posts about the coronavirus, with Twitter even going as far as introducing new rules that ban users who repeatedly claim that vaccinated people can spread COVID, alt-tech platforms such as Rumble have welcomed those who have been banned by the tech giants.
Not only has Rumble given a platform to censored users such as Paul but it’s also expanding into another area that’s dominated by Big Tech – cloud services. The video-sharing platform will be providing cloud service infrastructure for former President Trump’s Truth Social and media network and is preparing to compete with Amazon and Microsoft as it builds out its hosting infrastructure.
