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“Bitchute’s North Star is free speech, which is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society,” BitChute said in a statement to Reuters. At the same time, the companies defended the rights of extremists to express themselves on their sites and downplayed the importance of their content. The sites, he said, had become the “first port of call” for conspiracists to publish videos.īitChute 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. “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.
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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.īitChute and Odysee videos revel in bogus conspiracy theories about the “Plandemic,” the “grand war against Whitey,” and Satanism and “sex magic” on college campuses, among other bizarre topics.īitChute 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. 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. Online misinformation, though usually legal, triggers real-world harm. 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. Searching the two sites on major news topics plunges viewers into a labyrinth of outlandish conspiracy theories, racist abuse and graphic violence. 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. An upstart BitChute rival, Odysee, has also taken off. 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.īitChute has boomed as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook tighten rules to combat misinformation and hate speech. 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. Three of the top 15 videos on the site that day blamed U.S.
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.
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