Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski joined Fox Business on Wednesday to discuss the major anti-trust lawsuit filed by Rumble and X against a major group of advertisers, which accuses them of coordinating a boycott against spending money on the platforms. Pavlovski later took to X with emails from advertising agencies in which the company was pressured to drop right-wing creators and do away with “right-wing culture” if they wanted advertising deals.

“If you’re an advertiser and you don’t wanna advertise on Rumble or X, that’s totally fine. You have the option to do that. But the problem happens when you have a consortium, or a group like the world federation of advertisers, or the group that they created called GARM, which then assembles all these advertisers and agencies, which creates a huge amount of power for GARM to basically instruct these companies on whether or not and how they want to employ brand safety standards,” Pavlovski told Fox Business.

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“They then can now discriminate against certain voices on other platforms,” he continued. “If they don’t like what some speech might happen on Rumble or X, they can say, we’re not going to touch that, which then causes advertising rates to go higher because now they’re only accessing a certain portion of the market and then drives higher prices for their shareholders and their brands. This harms the advertisers, the shareholders, it creates a higher fees for the agencies and also harms Rumble creators and Rumble viewers and the Rumble platform.”

Pavlovski went on to describe ad agencies of operating as a “harmful monopoly.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Pavlovski revealed the first of a series of conversations with advertisers surrounding the prospect of deals with Rumble.

The first email was from Diageo North America, a leading alcoholic beverage company that is part of the “GARM Steer Team,” Pavlovski noted. In an email to Rumble, Diageo wrote that “there is no scenario where we approve a platform that has Steven Crowder, Alex Jones or the like. The content on your platform is non-compliant pretty much across every category we try to avoid.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by Inspire Brands, whose clients include Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin Robbins, Jimmy Johns and a number of additional high-profile brands. “To be honest [redacted], I would be opposed to showing up on the current version of the platform — the right-wing culture of the site is too polarizing from a brand standpoint today,” a representative for Inspire Brands wrote in an email to Rumble.

They added that they will be open to continuing discussions “as the platform evolves.”

Photo: Chris Pavlovski via X

“When you have a monopoly and you create a monopoly by assembling all this power and control to dictate a certain standard of how you’re gonna spend that money, that’s not a free market. The Sherman Act does not allow that,” Pavlovski told Fox Business.

“So that’s illegal.  There’s different rules and standards when you’re a monopoly. And what the World Federation of Advertisers has done is they created a monopoly to basically tell all these advertisers how they should spend money based on certain speech,” he continued.

“So you can’t use the First Amendment by having a monopoly to dictate how you’re going to deploy funds. This is harmful to their advertisers. It’s harmful to the Rumble creators. And it’s basically, there’s a completely different set of rules when you’re in monopoly, and that’s how you have to look at this. They monopolize the ad budgets.

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