Rumble CEO leaves Europe after telegram arrest | Hacker News Reader

Rumble CEO leaves Europe after telegram arrest

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> Chris Pavlovski @chrispavlovski

> I'm a little late to this, but for good reason — I've just safely departed from Europe. France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram's CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech. Rumble will not stand for this behavior and will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right. We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov's immediate release.

Based on the tone, he's clearly at least one of three things: a grifter, a wingnut, or a comic book superhero. The first two are statistically more likely.

What makes you qualified to make such an expansive claim about a stranger's inner character?

Like most people, my activity on HN is hit and miss, but as a general rule I am careful about using the word 'you': if I agree with someone or want to encourage them, I favor using 'you', but if I disagree with, or dislike, a comment, I avoid 'you' and stick to the content. It tends to keep things cordial and upbeat. I don't insist that everyone else follow this rule, but I've gotten good mileage from it and others might find it useful; it's also why I have a bad feeling about answering this comment directly.

You seem to enjoy placing yourself above others. First by doing a character assassination of the Rumble guy, then by taking a superior attitude with me and lecturing me.

You have an instinct to defend people, which, regardless of our disagreement, I admire.

Never heard of Rumble but I gather it's like a conservative YouTube or something?

That's not really comparable with telegram IMO.

Basically, yeah. Another “free speech absolutism” media company that doesn’t want to acknowledge that some speech (e.g. Holocaust denial) is actually illegal in many countries in mainland Europe, because it’s their bread and butter to host said speech.

Rumble isn’t a huge platform and I doubt this is much more than a publicity stunt.

>looking for a new platform

>ask if their platform is free speech or holocaust denial

>they doesnt understand

>pull out illustrated diagram explaing what is free speech and what is holocaust denial

>they laugh and says “it’s a good platform sir”

>join

>its holocaust denial

it's the unfortunate case for a lot of so called free speech things unfortunately

It's practically a dog whistle at this point. These days I look for those advertising non-commercialness or communality as keywords.

A lot of people used to believe that it was important to tolerate speech they did not agree with, and opposed any laws that oppressed free speech, as it would lead to a world where careless talk or disagreement with the establishment authority led to unjust imprisonment, and here we are, they were right.

Most people have never strayed from YouTube. Why would one?

Yet, Rumble has been in operation for over 10 years with a stated aim of better serving content creators since "Google was prioritizing influencers on YouTube and not independent content creators" [0].

Basically, as an alternative to the one and only anointed Algorithm brought to you by whatever the prevailing market forces wanted to allow or increase viewership of for whatever reason.

As time would show, the founder was apparently correctly observing a gap in the market.

In 2020, with many people increasingly online, all of the major social media platforms (including YouTube) increasingly banned what they termed to be misinformation (when in fact it was highly debatable what was the actual misinformation being pumped out--only, those debates were generally rapidly banned from such platforms, so it was hard for many people to even be aware of what alternate arguments existed in any meaningful/organic sense).

So, alternatives to YouTube gained more usage, among them:

- Rumble

- Odysee (was: LBRY)

- Bitchute

Prior to 2020, you might hear "Bitchute" or one of the other alternative video hosting platforms and immediately think of some very, very unsavory political content (Rule 34 of the internet). That's how I guess such platforms had been portrayed in the mainstream and main-alternative media until then.

So, for most people, unless they were for some reason interested in any of the unorthodox views (in any domain, really), or in the content of content creators who had been banned from YouTube already (in many cases, with totally reasonable content being the reason for the ban), then, yeah, there would be no reason to ever hear of them, probably--except maybe in the most shallow and extremely negative, caricaturish light imaginable (why that would be, IDK).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(company)

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