Skip to main content

Trending

  • Fox/Dominion Lawsuit
  • Meta
  • Twitter

Social Media Menu

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Utility Navigation

  • Take Action
  • Search
  • Donate

Media Matters for America

Main navigation

  • News & Analysis
  • Research & Studies
  • Audio & Video
  • Archives

Media Matters for America

  • Nav
  • Search

Main navigation

  • News & Analysis
  • Research & Studies
  • Audio & Video
  • Archives

Trending

  • Fox/Dominion Lawsuit
  • Meta
  • Twitter

Utility Navigation

  • Take Action
  • Search
  • Donate

Social Media Menu

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
Facebook_Rumble_QAnon
Media Matters / Andrea Austria

Facebook is allowing users in right-wing groups to promote QAnon-supporting Rumble videos, despite the platform’s QAnon ban

Media Matters identified over 1,100 posts in right-wing Facebook groups linking to a known QAnon channel’s Rumble videos from November and December 2022

Written by Natalie Mathes

Published 01/09/23 2:54 PM EST

Share

  • Email
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print

Comment

  • Comments

Facebook is allowing users to post QAnon-promoting videos from the conservative video-sharing platform Rumble, even though Meta has policies banning QAnon-related content. Media Matters identified over 1,100 posts in right-wing Facebook groups that linked to Rumble videos from November and December by the QAnon-supporting show X22 Report. 

Meta's policies against “movements and organizations tied to violence” include a ban on accounts promoting QAnon — a dangerous conspiracy theory linked to multiple instances of violence that has been flagged as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI. While Meta has previously claimed to be strengthening its policy enforcement by identifying “new terms associated with QAnon and how people attempt to skirt our detection,” users in right-wing Facebook groups are routinely sharing links to QAnon videos on Rumble.

Rumble, which enables extremists to promote and profit from false, dangerous, and hateful rhetoric, has become the go-to video-sharing platform for QAnon influencers. Media Matters previously identified 12 popular QAnon podcasts that regularly posted on Rumble to at least 1.7 million collective subscribers. Despite this extremism, the platform boasts a growing audience and has received investments from prominent right-wing figures. 

X22 Report is a QAnon-promoting show with a history of amplifying extreme anti-vaccine misinformation, overt support for the January 6 insurrection, and baseless anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. The show joined Rumble in 2020 after being banned from YouTube during a QAnon crackdown. X22 Report has been directly linked to at least one act of real world violence: in 2020, a man derailed a train nearby a hospital ship docked at a port in Los Angeles that was treating COVID-19 patients. He told investigators that he believed the hospital ship “was part of a government conspiracy to bring healthy ‘open-minded’ people onto the ship and ‘get rid of them,’” and described “reading internet materials related to conspiracy groups, such as ‘X22 Report,’ the ‘Great Awakening,’ and ‘Q.’”

From November 1 through December 30, 2022, the channel posted a total of 111 videos to Rumble — often two times per day — to over 630,000 subscribers, collectively earning over 23 million views. Many of these videos featured advertisements in their accompanying description boxes and during the videos themselves. 

The most-viewed video from this period was uploaded to Rumble on November 25, 2022, and features commentary surrounding Elon Musk’s new ownership and management of Twitter. (In December, supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory celebrated a tweet from Musk which featured a phrase that has been regularly invoked in the community, taking it as evidence that he supposedly supports the conspiracy theory in some manner.) Throughout the video, the host of X22 Report interprets numerous interactions between Musk and right-wing figures on Twitter to allege that Musk will use Twitter to help expose everything that the so-called deep state “puppet masters” have done to control society. The video currently has over 560,000 views.

X22 most viewed

As Rumble provides right-wing and QAnon extremists with a growing platform, mainstream platforms, such as Facebook, are allowing users to promote Rumble videos with extremist content to a larger audience.

Media Matters identified at least 1,153 posts in public and private right-wing Facebook groups that linked to those 111 Rumble videos from X22 Report in November and December. Often, these posts were shared by the same handful of users.

X22 Collage 1
X22 Collage 2

The Latest

  1. Tucker Carlson: “Paying people to not talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America”

    Video & Audio 03/20/23 8:42 PM EDT

  2. Fox News host struggles to define woke: “It could be a feeling, it could be a sense”

    Video & Audio 03/20/23 6:17 PM EDT

  3. Right-wing media scramble to defend Trump ahead of a potential indictment and arrest

    Article 03/20/23 5:37 PM EDT

  4. NYT reporting pushes back on Hunter Biden allegations amid House GOP investigation

    Article 03/20/23 4:46 PM EDT

  5. Elon Musk has boosted a QAnon influencer at least two dozen times since he took over Twitter and reinstated the account

    Article 03/20/23 4:22 PM EDT

Pagination

  • Current page 1
  • …
  • Next page ››

In This Article

  • Rumble

    Rumble tag image
  • Facebook

    Facebook-MMFA-Tag.png
  • QAnon Conspiracy Theory

    QAnon-Conspiracy-Theory-MMFA-Tag.png
Comments
0 Comments
Share Count
0 Shares

Related

  1. Rumble is profiting off of ads running on QAnon, extremist, and white nationalist channels

    Article 11/04/22 1:05 PM EDT

  2. Report: Rumble wants to be the “new frontier in social media,” and Facebook is helping it get there

    Article 03/30/22 5:55 PM EDT

  3. How Devin Nunes and Kash Patel appealed to QAnon extremists to build Truth Social’s user base

    Article 08/01/22 10:28 AM EDT

Media Matters for America

Sign up for email updates

Footer menu

  • About
  • Contact
  • Corrections
  • Submissions
  • Jobs
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Social Media Menu

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

© 2023 Media Matters for America