Reuters Publishes Big Hit Piece Against BitChute, Rumble and Odysee for Hosting “Misinformation”

Elvis Dunderhoff August 23, 2022

The trannies are calling for Cloudflare to shut down drama forum Kiwi Farms, and their signal has been boosted to the point it is trending on Twitter several days in a row.

Cloudflare is a semi-monopoly CDN backbone service that basically all websites need to run.

Meanwhile, the media is doing major hit pieces on alternative video sites.

They said “make your own Twitter/YouTube/Facebook,” and then people did make their own, and they’ve been calling for them to be banned ever since.

Andrew Anglin has said since 2017 that all of the things that happened to Daily Stormer in terms of banning would happen to anyone who disagreed with the Jews/government/media. People will say “oh, Anglin, looks like your prediction was wrong!” – but in every case, it is is not wrong, it just hasn’t happened yet.

Reuters:

BitChute and Odysee serve up conspiracies, racism and graphic violence to millions of viewers. Taking advantage of Big Tech disinformation crackdowns and the rise of Trump, the sites reflect a new media universe – one where COVID-19 is fake, Russia fights Nazis in Ukraine, and mass shootings are ‘false flag’ operations.

A day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, the video-sharing website BitChute was amplifying a far-right conspiracy theory that the massacre was a so-called false flag operation, meant to discredit gun-loving Americans.

Three of the top 15 videos on the site that day blamed U.S. federal agents instead of the true culprit: a white-supremacist teenager who had vowed to “kill as many blacks as possible” before shooting 13 people, killing 10. Other popular videos uploaded by BitChute users falsely claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused cancers that “literally eat you” and spread the debunked claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates caused a global baby-formula shortage.

BitChute has boomed as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook tighten rules to combat misinformation and hate speech. An upstart BitChute rival, Odysee, has also taken off. Both promote themselves as free-speech havens, and they’re at the forefront of a fast-growing alternative media system that delivers once-fringe ideas to millions of people worldwide.

Searching the two sites on major news topics plunges viewers into a labyrinth of outlandish conspiracy theories, racist abuse and graphic violence. As their viewership has surged since 2019, they have cultivated a devoted audience of mostly younger men, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.

Some of the BitChute video thumbnails included in the Reuters article:

Online misinformation, though usually legal, triggers real-world harm. U.S. election workers have faced a wave of death threats and harassment inspired by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, which also fueled the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot. Reuters interviews with a dozen people accused of terrorizing election workers revealed that some had acted on bogus information they found on BitChute and almost all had consumed content on sites popular among the far-right.

BitChute and Odysee both host hundreds of videos inspired by the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose supporters have been arrested for threatening politicians, abducting children and blocking a bridge near Arizona’s Hoover Dam with an armored truck full of guns and ammunition.

“Platforms such as BitChute and Odysee have had a seismic impact on the disinformation landscape,” said Joe Ondrak of Logically, a British firm that works with governments and other organizations to reduce the harm of misinformation. The sites, he said, had become the “first port of call” for conspiracists to publish videos.

Source

BitChute and Odysee say they comply with the law by, for example, removing terrorism-related material, and that they have rules banning racist content or incitement of violence. At the same time, the companies defended the rights of extremists to express themselves on their sites and downplayed the importance of their content. “Bitchute’s North Star is free speech, which is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society,” BitChute said in a statement to Reuters. Odysee said that right-wing and conspiracy content didn’t define the platform, which it said is focusing on generating science- and technology-related videos.

Despite the platforms’ rules, their users routinely publish overtly racist videos and post comments that call for violence, a Reuters review of the sites found. BitChute and Odysee didn’t respond to questions about content that appeared to violate the sites’ guidelines.

All social media platforms publish standards saying they don’t accept extreme or hateful content, said Callum Hood of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in London. “The real test is: Do they live up to those standards? With BitChute and Odysee, the answer is an emphatic no.”

Some academics who have researched BitChute and Odysee say their relaxed content-moderation practices result in sites that are dominated by incendiary content that most online publishers routinely reject. Benjamin Horne, a social scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and two colleagues reviewed more than 440,000 BitChute videos and found that 12% of channels received more than 85% of the engagement. “Almost all of those channels contain far-right conspiracies or extreme hate speech,” their report concluded.

Reuters searches of the sites show that their most popular videos are often full of abusive content and misinformation that grossly distort news events.

The top BitChute and Odysee videos in searches for “Buffalo shooting” assert that the massacre never happened. Three of the top 10 on Odysee claimed that Black survivors and witnesses were actors. “It’s payday in the ghetto,” said one commentator. Another video defended the racist theory that motivated the shooter: that whites are being “replaced” by non-whites through migration and population growth. The only purely factual video among BitChute’s top 10 results attracted a slew of racist comments, with one viewer describing the shooter as a “patriot” and his victims as “dumb n‑‑‑‑‑s.”

Searching for “COVID” on BitChute one recent day produced a short film called Plandemic as the top result. Plandemic was banned by YouTube and Facebook for its potentially harmful misinformation, including the claim that wearing a facemask “literally activates your own virus” and makes you sick. At least seven of the top 10 “COVID” search results on Odysee also contained falsehoods – for example, that vaccines contain dangerous nanoparticles or have side-effects that are “like a nuclear bomb.”

It’s a similar story with a widely reported atrocity of the Russia-Ukraine war. Nine out of the top 10 search results on BitChute for “Bucha massacre” theorized that the killing by Russian soldiers of Ukrainian citizens was a hoax intended to escalate U.S. involvement in the war, or that it was the work of Ukrainian soldiers, British agents or “Nazis.”

Identical YouTube searches on these topics produced almost all factual reports from established news organizations. This is consistent with YouTube’s policy of prioritizing information from what it calls “authoritative sources” on sensitive topics or events.

…

A more direct competitor to BitChute and Odysee is Rumble, a larger video-sharing site that attracts right-wing users. Rumble also touts itself as a free-speech champion and attracts thousands of videos promoting conspiracy theories. But Rumble has mainstream ambitions and better financial backing, and the company moderates its content enough to make it palatable to app stores run by Apple and Google – a key growth driver for any digital business.

Some of the Rumble video thumbnails included in the Reuters article:

Here’s the situation right now:

Cloudflare is the next level of banning. Right now, Cloudflare is in damage control mode, under attack by trannies. They are blocking people and actually blocking all replies on tweets.

Cloudflare CEO has blocked all replies.

Both “Kiwifarms” and “#DropKiwifarms” have been trending.

The media is covering this tranny who is getting made fun of on Kiwi Farms, and naming Cloudflare as the responsible party.

Frankly, Kiwi Farms is just a forum, and it can survive being dropped by Cloudflare. Video hosting sites probably can’t survive being dropped by Cloudflare.

Stormer was banned from Cloudflare in 2017 for making fun of some fat woman who had a heart attack. Then a couple years later, 8chan was banned. We are the only sites that have ever been banned from Cloudflare, with their worm CEO claiming the site supports free speech. Of course, now that they’ve banned one site (two sites), they are implicitly endorsing everything that they haven’t banned. If they would have held onto “we will never ban anyone,” they could hold that ground safely. But once you ban someone, you’re endorsing everything you haven’t banned.

Andrew Anglin said this: he said that after everyone was banned from social media, they would come for the independent websites by demanding they be banned from backbone services.

It has begun.

Š Copyright Daily Stormer 2023, All Rights Reserved -- Join the Daily Stormer site chat for future updates in case of further domain seizure.