Rumble Video Platform CEO Chris Pavlovski has posted a message at X thanking President Donald Trump for defending freedom of expression in the announcement of tariffs to Brazil on Wednesday (9).
According to him, the American company was “illegally expelled” from the Brazilian territory because it did not give in to the pressure of authorities whose objective was to censor its activities.
“Thank you, President Trump, for defending the rights of freedom of expression and recognizing how Rumble was illegally expelled from the Brazilian market. While many other platforms gave in to the demands of censorship of the Supreme Court (including X), Rumble did not give in and will not give in,” Pavlovski wrote.
Rumble announced its departure from Brazil in 2023 as a protest due to the wave of censorship that has been imposed on its users through court orders and the pressure of the Lula administration.
At the time, the Rumble CEO said he would not be intimidated “by foreign demands to censor creators” of the platform.
In February, when he announced a lawsuit with Trump Media against Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, Rumble said that the Brazilian magistrate has a “worrying historical illegal and authoritarian online platform censorship” and follow his orders would be “endangering the fundamental commitment of the US with freedom of expression”, citing the case of “a specific user, politically known.”
In the process, the plaintiffs argued that Moraes’ orders do not only violate the United States’s constitutional order by undermining the basic principle of freedom of expression, but also violates national sovereignty by stating that “a Brazilian court can work on an American company involved in US -based activities without the consent of the US government.”
In the letter sent to Lula on Wednesday, Trump mentions that Brazil “issued hundreds of secret and illegal censorship orders to US social media platforms, threatening them with millions of dollars in fines and eviction of the Brazilian social media market.”
Therefore, the US government will impose from August 1, 2025 a 50% rate on any and all Brazilian products sent to the United States. Lula replied the letter saying that he will apply reciprocal measures.
