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Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski this week sat down with actor, comedian, and Rumble show host Russell Brand to discuss a range of topics like his video platform’s role at a time of prevalent online censorship – and the stance Western governments have assumed in relation to freedom of expression.
Pavlovski sought to identify free speech as the core component in the historic achievement of the US civil rights movement. “It all comes down to one thing, freedom, freedom of speech. That’s where it comes from,” he said.
Pavlovski compared his platform’s struggle to remain open to freedom of expression to the efforts of those fighting for civil rights decades ago, and said this gave him and others at Rumble “a sense of purpose.”
At the same time, Pavlovski doesn’t think that governments of some leading Western countries are staying true to that crucial building block of their democracies.
The Rumble CEO “named and shamed” just a few – the US, the UK, Australia, and Ireland, where he said censorship laws that criminalize speech, all the way to putting people in jail, are either being drafted or enacted.
“That’s a scary place to be. That’s not a place I want to grow up in,” Pavlovski said. “But that’s what these laws are aiming to do. They’re giving the power to the government to determine what you can and cannot say. And that is a place that we have known throughout history, is a very bad place to go. And we need to do everything in the world to stop it.”
In the context of Western countries failing the very foundations of democracy, he also mentioned freedom of expression protections as part of not only the First Amendment in the US but also the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As for the way these governments get away with blatant violations of their own founding postulates – and laws – Pavlovski spoke about the Covid pandemic as an event that was used to “take away more rights from everybody, they use that as an excuse to infringe and take more power for them(selves).”
And in this context, Pavlovski asserted that his is the only platform that pushes back against such abuses – which he referred to as, “encroachment.”
Another issue that came up during the conversation was whether or not YouTube is carrying out censorship on behalf of yet another government – this time, that of Russia.
He noted that, unlike YouTube, Rumble is among those that got banned in Russia, something happened well after Russian outlets like RT got banned in the West – and after Rumble itself was previously “criticized” for refusing to censor RT (by Western countries).
Trying to make sense of this unholy mess, Pavlovski noted, “All of a sudden now Russia bans Rumble and YouTube is still operating there. So what is YouTube doing? Why isn’t the media writing about that? Why don’t they care about that?”
“They seem to care when we stand on the principle of free speech. But they don’t care when there’s actual cooperation happening. Not at all. They still only care about trying to knock us down,” said the Rumble CEO.
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