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(CN) — The online video platform site Rumble filed a federal lawsuit against the creators of a nonprofit advertising watchdog organization claiming it is spreading false and defamatory statements about Rumble online.
Filed in the Middle District of Florida, the suit accuses Check My Ads founders Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin and Media Matters for America, a D.C. based “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media," of launching a “disinformation campaign to demonetize Rumble.”
To do so, Rumble claims Jammi and Atkin spread false statements about its business practices, ad placements, and revenue streams, as well as publicly pressured advertisers to drop Rumble through articles published on CheckMyAds.org and posts on X, formerly Twitter.
Check My Ads claims to “expose the tactics that adtech companies use to push advertiser dollars towards hate and disinformation outlets, holding them accountable to their clients and to the public.”
But Rumble argues the organization has engaged in “their own hypocritical disinformation campaign to censor, silence, and cancel speech by spreading false, materially misleading, and defamatory statements and engaging in tortious conduct to convince advertisers to withdraw ad spends from platforms like Rumble that host content creators who espouse views contrary to Defendants’ hyper-partisan sensibilities.”
Rumble says Jammi and Atkin have previously created anonymous X accounts to publicly pressure companies to stop advertising on the news site Breitbart and to boycott certain Fox News hosts.
“They developed the playbook to cut off ad revenue to these platforms by spreading malicious falsehoods about how large corporate advertisers’ products were being featured with — and therefore suggesting an endorsement of — politically charged or otherwise controversial content,” Rumble says in its complaint. The Clare Locke firm attorney wrote in the complaint.
Jammi and Atkin created fake profiles on X and visited sites of particularly controversial content creators, continually refreshing those pages until ads for large brands appeared, Rumble says.
According to Rumble, in March 2023, Netflix stopped advertising on its site after Media Matters engineered it so that Netflix ads would appear on a user-generated video on Rumble expressing antisemitic views.
“Media Matters staff repeatedly refreshed the user-generated video — in some cases, more than 70 times — causing Rumble’s advertising system to serve different advertisements until Media Matters found one that it could use as fodder for its public pressure campaign,” Rumble says in its complaint.
“As it turned out, the Media Matters employee engaging in this tactic was the only one to actually view the Netflix ad on the video. And once Rumble learned about this antisemitic content on its platform — a clear violation of Rumble’s content moderation policies — it immediately removed the video.”
In addition, Rumble says Jammi and Atkin repeatedly spread statements online that the platform is dependent on revenue from Google Ads, which the company says is completely false and defamatory. Rumble claims Google Ads now represents less that 1% of its revenue and that it launched its own advertising platform last year “to further insulate itself and its shareholders from Big Tech.”
Dedicated to protecting a “free and open” internet and supporting small content creators, the content-neutral video platform claims the defamatory remarks have reduced its revenue, damaged its reputation and brand, as well as its market value. Rumble says that in the week following the article Jammi and Atkin published on CheckMyAds.org, investors divested their stock in the company, and it lost nearly $185 million in market capitalization.
The company seeks an injunction barring the defendants from repeating any statements adjudicated to be false or defamatory, as well as damages including punitive damages.
Attorney Jered T. Ede of Clare Locke represents Rumble.
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