When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021, it was obvious that he would have to find somewhere else to post. His own platform, Truth Social, was still a distant dream, so he had to choose one of the “alt-tech” platforms hosting professed free-speech absolutists, vaccine skeptics, Hunter Biden obsessives, and MAGA shitposters. He could have gone to Parler, where much of the pregaming for the January 6 riot took place, or Gab, where an account had long been held for him. But that June, he chose Rumble, a Toronto-based YouTube alternative that his son Don Jr. had been dabbling in for months. Founded in 2013, Rumble originally differentiated itself by providing more options for users looking to earn money from their videos—but now it’s “the right-wing’s go-to video site,” per The New York Times.

Other alt-tech CEOs were envious and didn’t hide it. John Matze, the former CEO of the Twitter alternative Parler, posted sarcastically about Rumble’s reliance on Google Ads, questioning the site’s anti–Big Tech bona fides. Andrew Torba, the founder of the ludicrously unmoderated Gab, ribbed Rumble for prohibiting anti-Semitism. (His site does not.) But Trump’s choice made sense: There are far more people on Rumble than on any other platform in the alt-tech ecosystem. In a recent press release, the company claimed that it had reached 78 million monthly average users in August, with 63 million of these being in the U.S. and Canada. And according to data from Similarweb, Rumble now sees more than 10 times the traffic of Trump’s Truth Social and close to 100 times the traffic of Parler.

Weirdly, though, Rumble is often overlooked by the mainstream. It was largely absent from the recent discourse about Kanye West’s supposed plans to buy Parler, and it was barely mentioned in a recent Times story about disinformation percolating on alt-tech sites. A Pew Research Center study from earlier this month found that more Americans have heard of Truth Social and Parler than of Rumble. This may be for any number of reasons—video sites are more challenging for journalists to pore over than text-based ones, YouTube is not the subject of quite as many accusations of anti-conservative bias as Facebook or Twitter are (making a YouTube alternative inherently less buzzy), Rumble has not positioned itself as a player in the culture wars until quite recently. (In 2020, its CEO, Chris Pavlovski, described his site to BuzzFeed News as “the clean YouTube competitor” and a place for people to “feel safe.”)

“I do think it flies under the radar,” Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School focused on the regulation of online speech, told me. “But it has some serious money behind it.”

[Read: An unholy alliance between Ye, Musk, and Trump]

Rumble has been on an upward trajectory since the second half of 2020. The right-wing personality Dan Bongino took an equity stake in the company and brought his popular show over from YouTube. The site saw huge growth, which escalated after the January 6 riot—it went from 1 million monthly average users at the beginning of 2020 to 36 million in the third quarter of 2021, according to Pavlovski. In December 2021, the company, which had received funding from the Trump ally and billionaire Peter Thiel and the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance, announced plans to go public. (This too inspired rival jealousy: The official Twitter account for Lbry, an alt-tech platform with a blockchain backbone, posted a sarcastic congratulatory message: “Everyone knows publicly traded companies are consistently great on free speech, just look at Google, Facebook, and Twitter.”) In September, Rumble opened a “creator studio” in Miami and went public via a SPAC. Today, the company is worth about $2.8 billion—much less than the likes of Meta, Snap, Twitter, and even Pinterest, but about on par with Yelp, for reference.

Rumble makes money through an advertising network and by licensing content to media partners—an arrangement that allows creators to get a cut of revenue. The ads attached to its videos range from normal (HP, Saks) to just west of normal (the former Grey’s Anatomy star Katherine Heigl talking about why dogs get “mushy poop”) to out at sea (an “IRS Loophole Kit” that can help the viewer protect their retirement accounts from Joe Biden). Many of its notable influencers have been deplatformed or prohibited from making money on other sites. For instance, there’s Steven Crowder, who is known for his use of racist and homophobic slurs, and who was suspended from making money on YouTube due to his violation of the site’s Partner Program policies. Arielle Scarcella, another demonetized YouTuber, recently posted on Rumble a video about abortion captioned “people are so woke, they have become totally evil.” Rumble’s homepage also promotes Lofi Girl, a wildly popular background-music account that was temporarily removed from YouTube this summer in response to a copyright complaint.

When I checked in recently, the homepage featured licensed news content from Reuters, as well as fairly obvious cooking and gaming content, a short clip titled “Toddler whacks ball directly into camera,” and a new video from the widely deplatformed former kickboxer Andrew Tate titled “THE DAM OF CENSORSHIP IS BREAKING.” The political and scientific fringe is certainly more concentrated and visible than it is on a site like YouTube: Rumble’s list of high-profile partners includes one of Donald Trump’s favorite news networks, OAN; its list of featured channels promotes Steve Bannon’s Bannon’s War Room. This is mixed in with anodyne content, such as videos of cute animals, pranks, and “Just Planes”—maybe not the content you would choose, but content you can see someone choosing. Viral videos involving pool-float mishaps and icy steps exist alongside anti-vaccine content, as well as videos dedicated to analyzing Meghan Markle’s body language for evidence of her “TRUE” (presumably bad) personality, and a series of stop-motion doodled educational videos with titles such as “Population Collapse Is Coming.”

None of this content is evidently bad enough for Rumble to have been banned from major online platforms or storefronts, unlike some of its peers at various times. But as a safeguard, the company has established its own cloud business and ad network to avoid relying on companies such as Amazon and Google. It could evade the type of situation Parler faced when it was kicked off of Amazon Web Services in January 2021, because—as Rumble has boasted—the site does not rely on AWS to serve its user base. (Gab, partly for this reason, is self-hosted.) “I think that’s definitely a big thing to watch,” Douek said, citing a recent controversy that led the content-delivery and security company Cloudflare to suspend its services to Kiwi Farms, a forum long known for coordinated harassment and incitement of violence.

In the past few years, Douek noted, there has been more pressure on app stores owned by Apple and Google, and on cloud providers and other intermediaries, to take on the role of content moderator by pulling the plug on platforms that won’t moderate themselves. “That’s often been quite successful,” she said. “These companies can be pressured and will sometimes take action on the basis of public pressure. If the alt-tech ecosystem was successful in building its own infrastructure services, that would make it significantly more invulnerable.” Rumble has already partnered with Truth Social for cloud services and ad tech—perhaps the first step toward building a broader foundation for an alt-tech ecosystem.

There are caveats. Corey Quinn, the chief cloud economist at the Duckbill Group and the author of a blog about AWS, points out that building cloud infrastructure is extremely difficult and expensive. And if Rumble makes a point of taking on customers that other services don’t want to host (“the most difficult customers on the planet”), a moment could come when so-called Tier 1 networks—internet service providers such as Lumen Technologies, Verizon, and Zayo are some of the big ones in the U.S.—“will say ‘enough’s enough’ and cut all of Rumble off,” he told me. (However, he couldn’t cite a significant instance of this happening in the past.)

[Read: A prominent vaccine skeptic returns to Twitter]

But, setting aside whatever other sites it might partner with, Rumble’s own content-moderation policies aren’t as absolutist as its marketing may suggest. It is currently in the process of refining its policies with input from users, but it already has rules against doxxing and stalking, defined as “misusing the platform to make others uncomfortable in their use of the platform through a pattern of continuous conduct.” When I asked about the evolution of Rumble’s rules and their enforcement, the spokesperson Brian Doherty wrote that the platform has “strict moderation policies banning the incitement of violence, illegal content, racism, antisemitism, promoting terrorist groups (designated by US and Canadian governments), and violating copyright, as well as many other restrictions.” On an informational page about its rule-making process, Rumble also notes “the freedom to hold and express unpopular beliefs”—while caveating that this is not the same as the freedom to “misuse the platform to target people based on legally protected status.” Notably, this page acknowledges the way in which a culture of trolling and harassment can make a platform less usable for everyone—resembling a point added to Reddit’s policies in the summer of 2020. However, the presence of influencers like Bannon and Tate, who are known for violent rhetoric, makes the company’s dedication to these stated values suspect at best.

Like a future Musk-owned Twitter, Rumble’s success might be less about the hard facts of the infrastructure it has built or the list of rules it publishes, and more about appealing to those disenchanted with Big Tech. It’s not that Rumble has radically different moderation policies from its rivals. Instead, it’s just playing into popular sentiment about major social-media platforms: They’re censorial. They don’t sufficiently prioritize the ability for creators to profit from their work. They’re too powerful, too centralized, too smug. Pavlovski made this case in a December 2021 interview on Fox Business, saying that Rumble would be offering cloud services and a video platform that were “completely immune to the cancel culture and the activists out there.” He also promised something more: “We’re really taking the internet to its roots by restoring it to its roots and really defending that free and open internet.”

For years, alternative social-media platforms have been in an uncertain phase. Will they work, or won’t they? With mainstream networks on shaky ground—Facebook is collapsing, Musk is taking over Twitter—Rumble seems to be rising to meet the moment, whether you’re watching or not.

On the surface, the case of Kanye West seems pretty cut and dry.

Earlier this week Adidas ended its partnership with rapper and fashion designer Ye (who previously went by Kanye West). Its decision came around the same time that a flurry of other companies also cut ties with the artist — but weeks after Ye began making offensive remarks.

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Cold-and-flu season is upon us, and COVID-19 is still here too. I called our staff writer Jacob Stern, who has published recent updates on the science of masking and hand-washing, and asked him to break down a few common misunderstandings about the spread of respiratory viruses and how to protect others when we get sick.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kanye West destroys himself. How Elon Musk could actually kill Twitter Congress can’t even do this one thing. Air Travel

Kelli María Korducki: Jacob, everyone seems to have a cold right now—including me! One would think that, with the masking and hand-washing habits we developed during the pandemic, we wouldn’t all be getting sick. And yet, here we are. What’s going on?

Jacob Stern: Well, it’s because we’re all still washing our hands and not wearing masks enough.

Hand-washing is still very important for preventing the transmission of gastrointestinal viruses and plenty of other pathogens. And as I wrote in my recent article, it is also important for preventing respiratory viruses in a more marginal way—but not as important as things having to do with air, like masking or ensuring good ventilation. Your cold is probably not the result of having not washed your hands; it is more likely the result of having been infected through the air with whatever coronavirus this happens to be. So, more likely the result of being in a crowded indoor space or spending a lot of time in close proximity to someone who was infected.

Kelli: In your article about masking, you mentioned the goal of changing “the physical world to stop viral transmission before it happens.” What does that world look like, and how far are we from achieving it?

Jacob: The basic insight there is that vaccines and antivirals are great. On the other hand, they take a really long time to develop, and they’re basically reactive. Like, we can’t design our vaccine for a virus until we know something about what that virus is going to be. But there are all sorts of things we can do to change our physical world—whether that’s improving ventilation or investing in germicidal lighting or wearing really high-quality masks—that can stop viral transmission. No matter what virus we encounter, those things are going to be effective.

In terms of how close we are to actually living in that sort of utopian, virus-free world that some people are hoping to create: I would say not super close.

Part of why the people I talk with in this piece are so interested in masks is because masking is easier than some of the other steps we need to take to get to that perfect world. Improved ventilation, for example, is something that has to be installed in buildings all over the place, and you need a huge amount of institutional buy-in there. As for germicidal lighting, more research still needs to be done on it, and there are probably regulations about what kinds of lighting are permitted in various places that would need to be changed. And then similarly, it would need to be installed.

Masks are the closest thing we have to a potential solution where a group of focused, committed people can make some progress on their own by designing better masks, making them more affordable, and then making plans to distribute them.

Kelli: What is the largest misconception about cold-and-flu season?

Jacob: I hesitate to go right at the largest, since I’m sure I’m going to forget something that is a still-bigger misconception. But one that didn’t even make it into any of my articles is this idea that you catch a cold from being physically cold or spending too much time outside—which, as we know from the past few years, is not what’s going on. Getting sick has to do with the dynamics of airborne transmission.

And then, similarly, there’s this idea that hand-washing is sort of the No. 1 public-health strategy that we have at our disposal, or at least the No. 1 individual public-health strategy that we have at our disposal. But what the past three years have taught us, if anything, is that hand-washing can do only so much. Thinking about air rather than transmission via surfaces is actually a way more effective strategy for the season we’re talking about.

Kelli: Over the summer, you listed some tips for how to be “a good sick person” in the COVID era. Do you have any suggestions that you would offer for the cold-and-flu season that we are currently enjoying?

Jacob: The really big one, which has not changed: If you are sick, stay home. It does not matter whether it’s COVID or something else. What we should have internalized is that going into work sick is not some great sacrifice or act of bravery. It’s sort of selfish because you’re going to put all your co-workers at risk of getting sick as well. Especially in this era when so many people are able to work from home.

That said, the big caveat here is that there are huge numbers of people around the country who do not have the capacity to work from home, or who may not even have paid sick leave at all. So this top piece of advice, sadly, is not something that a lot of people can take. And the solution to that obviously has to be a policy solution.

Related:

The great pandemic hand-washing blooper The masks we’ll wear in the next pandemic Today’s News The latest U.S. government data show that GDP rose 0.6 percent after two quarters of decline, but other indicators suggest an economic slowdown. Elon Musk published an open letter in anticipation of his purchase of Twitter this week, stating that he is acquiring the platform to create “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” The Pentagon outlined a new national-security strategy that highlights the dangers posed by China and Russia. Evening Read (Juergen Teller for The Atlantic)

Rachel Cusk Won’t Stay Still

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

To access Rachel Cusk’s apartment in Paris, on the top floor of a narrow residential building in the Marais, you must first climb five flights of winding stairs. Once inside her place, you are confronted with yet another staircase, at the top of which runs a sleek corridor of rooms and a highly Instagrammable reading nook. From that level, there remains a final, minimal set of steps leading up to a loftlike living space, which gives way to a lovely terrace with unobstructed views that more than justify the effort needed to get there.

It is not every day that a writer you believe to be one of the greatest living novelists up and expatriates to a few minutes from your doorstep … Cusk’s is a literature of immaculately crafted observations, as aesthetically exhilarating as it is philosophically devastating. And I have a suspicion that this move to Paris—a city full of the sort of bourgeois social situations she captures with such punishing honesty—will yield something spectacular.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The world’s newest republic How to make life more transcendent Cowardice at Sundance Culture Break A behind-the-scenes shot of the filming of The Fits. (Cinematic Collection / Alamy)

Read. The Furrows, a new novel by Namwali Serpell that explores grief as it’s really experienced.

Watch. The Fits (on Showtime), an astonishing and under-the-radar debut from 2016 about the bizarre ways peer pressure can manifest.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I asked Jacob if he wanted to recommend anything not related to avoiding respiratory viruses. “I had never seen Seinfeld until, like, two weeks ago, when I started watching it on Netflix,” he told me. “There are definitely episodes that have aged poorly, but for the most part I think it’s incredibly funny. Definitely recommend.”

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Several people who were once close to Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, told CNN that he has long been fascinated by Adolf Hitler and once wanted to name an album after the Nazi dictator. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday said he is "extremely pleased" with the "overwhelming reaction" to recent antisemitic comments from rapper and fashion designer Ye, also known as Kanye West.

Several people who were once close to the artist formerly known as Kanye West told CNN that he has long been fascinated by Adolf Hitler — and once wanted to name an album after the Nazi leader.

Adidas is the latest brand to cut ties with Kanye West, also known as Ye, after receiving pressure from the public over a series of antisemitic comments he made. CNN's Christine Romans and Oliver Darcy report.

If Kanye West is worried about the multiple businesses that have ended relationships with him following his antisemitic comments, he's not acting like it.

Peloton has "indefinitely paused" playing Kanye West's music from its streaming workout classes.