FIRST ON FOX: Rumble, a popular video-sharing platform, announced Monday the launch of a new cloud service it says will champion the “free and open internet,” and ease companies’ fears of facing censorship or the threat of being deplatformed because of their values.
Speaking with FOX Business ahead of the launch, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski touted his company’s values of “freedom of expression and the First Amendment,” and cited Amazon Web Services’ decision to drop conservative social media network Parler from its web hosting services following the Jan. 6 2021 Capitol protests as the main driver behind developing its own cloud service.
“When we saw that happen, we took it upon ourselves to make sure that could never happen to a platform like Rumble,” Pavlovski said. “After that moment, we realized that it was very important for us to … start owning our infrastructure, and start owning our own servers.”
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“We saw it as an existential threat to our business after what they did to Parler, that we needed to build our own cloud. And not only did we think that Rumble just needed it, but we felt like a large part of America wants something that inherits the same kind of values that they have,” he added. “We’re all about American values, and sticking with American principles.”
According to Rumble, its new service, called Rumble Cloud, is designed to help businesses become independent from traditional providers, including their “unfair pricing, vendor lock-in strategies, and censorship.”
The company says Rumble Cloud, which serves as the backbone of Rumble.com, will include “a portfolio of essential cloud computing services, available by self-service, including virtual machines and Kubernetes orchestration, block and object storage, load balancers, and a virtual private cloud option.”
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It will also seek to provide “predictable and affordable” pricing, including fixed-price monthly plans with unlimited usage, much like what Netflix offers its users.
Pavlovski told Fox that the importance of Rumble Cloud comes down to less about what the company will do, and more about what it’s not going to do: engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”
“The idea is we’re not going to cancel someone based on any political bias whatsoever. Whether they’re a religious university, or whether they’re not, we’re not going to discriminate against any customer based on political pressure or political biases, etc. That’s what I see the Parler situation had. It was due to political pressure and biases at the time,” he said.
Pavlovski added that, although Parler’s deplatforming disproportionately affected conservatives, Rumble users actually represent a wide range of viewpoints and backgrounds. In fact, recent data from Comscore showed a plurality of Rumble’s unique visitors (35%) were actually Democrats, followed by independents (29%) and Republicans (22%), debunking the often repeated talking point that the site operates as a right-wing echo chamber.
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That diverse group is further made evident by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s campaign being one of Rumble’s high-profile customers.
Kennedy’s campaign manager, Amaryllis Kennedy, echoed Pavlovski’s beliefs concerning American values as they relate to internet freedom, telling Fox Business, “Partisanship and censorship are threats to uniting the country. In almost every aspect of the campaign, we ask ourselves how do we make choices that are the most inclusive and neutral so that everyone feels welcome.”
“This includes our choices of business services to run the campaign. The new Rumble Cloud provides a neutral and independent cloud infrastructure to run our essential campaign applications, free of Big Tech and government censorship,” she said.
Former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who serves as CEO of the Trump Media and Technology Group, also praised Rumble for developing its new cloud offering, calling it “essential in today’s market.”
“A trusted partner since day one, Rumble Cloud’s incredible service and unrivaled performance have paved the way for Truth Social’s rapid growth,” he told FOX Business, referencing former President Donald Trump’s social media site that operates on the cloud.
When asked about the state of censorship across the country and what the future held for free speech on the internet, Pavlovski was pessimistic.
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“I think censorship is going to be getting much more intelligent,” he said. “What I think is going to happen is, as we get to a later stage here, as technology improves, is that things like artificial intelligence and just systems in general are going to get a lot smarter at deprioritizing and hiding people, which makes them feel like they’re still around, but they’re not banned.”
“So it’s going to be a type of censorship that’s far more intelligent, but I believe it will be far more effective censorship for the people that want to censor. So I do think it’s going to get much worse because it’s going to get far more intelligent,” he added.