President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating video platform Rumble for undisclosed reasons, the agency confirmed to Wired on Monday.
The SEC’s acknowledgment of the investigation to Wired comes after an April reportby investment research firm Culper Research alleging that Rumble boosts measurements of its monthly active users (MAU) by 66% to 108%, which the company vehemently denies. Culper Research disclosed its “short” position on Rumble at the time of the report’s release, indicating potential profit if Rumble’s stock falls.
“Rumble now claims (as of Q4 2022) to have 80 million MAUs, yet SimilarWeb estimates that in Q4, Rumble.com saw a unique web-based audience of just 28.9 million, SEMrush estimates 38.8 million unique web visitors, and we estimate Rumble’s cumulative mobile app downloads totaled just 9.5 million through Q4 2022,” the report states.
The report is inaccurate and part of an effort to take down Rumble, CEO Chris Pavlovski asserted on Monday.
“The report is bogus, but that doesn’t matter—it’s all to get investors to sell the stock so the short seller profits,” Pavlovski stated. “Good news, it won’t work. We saw the attacks coming, and we prepared for them. Prior to going public, we chose to use Google Analytics to track and report our MAUs, so we could be ready for this very moment.”
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