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.”

“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.”