Video platform blocks Brazil

Rumble has refused the South American country’s demands to censor creators

The video sharing service Rumble announced on Friday that it would disable access to all users from Brazil pending its legal challenge of the Brazilian court order to censor certain creators.

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski revealed the move in a post on X (formerly Twitter), noting that the court orders clashed with the company’s mission to “restore a free and open Internet.”

“Users with unpopular views are free to access our platform on the same terms as our millions of other users,” Pavlovski wrote. “Accordingly, we have decided to disable access to Rumble for users in Brazil while we challenge the legality of the Brazilian courts' demands.”

Brazilians who lost their access to Rumble content have only their courts to blame, he added, noting that he hoped the judges would reconsider their decision so that the service could be restored soon.

I will not be bullied by foreign government demands to censor Rumble creators.

In a follow-up post, Pavlovski noted that Rumble was “the only company at our scale that holds the line for free speech and American values,” and that he hoped some day other Big Tech companies would do the same. “I will continue to lead by example until that day arrives,” he added.

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Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and hosts the ‘System Update’ show on Rumble, noted that the Brazilian Supreme Court is “consumed with censoring political speech,” to the point that it banned platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp for failing to immediately obey their censorship orders.

This is the second time Rumble has suspended service in a country over a censorship row. In November 2022, Pavlovski defied France’s orders to censor certain Russian-language outlets, citing the company’s free speech mission. 

Pavlovski, a Canadian tech entrepreneur, founded Rumble in 2013 after seeing YouTube giving priority to influencers after getting acquired by the search engine giant Google. The platform grew in popularity starting in 2020, after a mass purge of dissident voices by Silicon Valley, and continued in 2021 with the influx of US conservatives censored elsewhere.