`, ``, or `![]()
`— is represented as an object or node in that tree. Selenium lets us find data on the page by explicitly pointing to a web element. More information about how to use the DOM and DevTools can be found [here](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/chrome-devtools/).
+
+Instead of manually clicking the “X” button, we find the corresponding element in the DOM, so we can point to it and let the WebDriver close it for us. We will use the `find_element()` function. Every web element has certain properties and attributes. Similarly, there are multiple viable ways to point to an element. Among them, css selectors and XPath are the most prominent ones, striking a good balance between ease of use and explicitness. In this tutorial, we will focus on an element’s XPath to find and interact with it.
+
+:::hub-note Note
+If you want to explore the usage of CSS selectors for Selenium, you can find great resources [here](https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/locating-elements.html).
+:::
+
+XPath uses path-like syntax. Upon inspecting the button “X” element, we find its node name to be “button”. However, for this ad pop up alone, there are three button nodes. So, we look for more unique attributes, like classes, id’s or aria-labels. Much like a file path on your computer, the longer the path, the more specific the kind of object it is pointing to. In this case, the element has an associated aria-label value “Close” we can use to find the element, store it in an object and use the `click()` function to trigger a mouse click action.
+
+
+```python
+from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
+
+#Most common XPath syntax: ‚//[@=“value“]‘
+
+# Find the "X" button and store it as a webdriver element
+close_button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//button[@aria-label="Close"]')
+
+print(close_button)
+```
+
+This output shows how Selenium stores a web element:
+
+```bash
+
+```
+
+Now we can click this button and see the pop-up being closed.
+
+```python
+# Click the "X" button to close the pop-up
+close_button.click()
+```
+
+## Rumble's trending page
+
+Rumble’s trending page is a good seismograph of the latest MAGA and extremist discourses in the US. After inspecting the menu bar on the left, you can see that the different sections are not represented as button elements but rather as hyperlinks with which we can navigate to the respective subdomain. Still, we could find and store the element through the href attribute and click it, like any user would do on the website. Alternatively, you can navigate to the subdomain directly via the `get()` function.
+
+:::hub-note Note
+There is no general rule as to either click on hyperlink elements or load the page directly. However, the `get()` function will load the whole page, whereas sometimes click actions on dynamic webpages will only reload a certain part of that page. This is important for large-scale data collection with time constrains but can be neglected within the scope of this tutorial.
+:::
+
+
+
+_Screenshot of Rumble’s menu bar with `` elements displaying the subdomains_
+
+```python
+# Find the "Trending" link and store it as a webdriver element, then click it
+trending_page = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//a[@href="/videos?sort=views&date=today"]')
+trending_page.click()
+
+#Alternatively, you can use the subdomain directly to navigate to it
+driver.get("https://rumble.com/videos?sort=views&date=today")
+```
+
+By default, the trending page lists the most viewed videos of the day. On the right side, there are many different filter options to choose from. Instead of today, we want to inspect the most viewed videos of the past week. Again, we could find the filter option as an element and click it, or we slightly change our URL to directly navigate to that filtered page.
+
+
+
+_Screenshot of Rumble’s trending page with filter options_
+
+Looking at the video elements in the DOM, we can see clearly structured `` items with the class “video-listing-entry”, which hold different child elements and attributes. On Rumble, there is no infinite scroll, as the content is separated into different pages. Each page contains 25 video items.
+
+
+
+_Screenshot of a video item with its associated DOM element_
+
+We can identify and store these video items by utilising the `find_elements()` function. While there are already valuable data points visible from the listing view alone, we don’t have access yet to the video description, its caption and the comment section. Therefore, we will only fetch the ‘href’ of each video and later visit each video page retrieve all data in detail.
+
+Doing so, we write a small function that not only finds the elements but also extracts their values for the ‘href’ attribute. This can be easily done with the `get_attribute()` function.
+
+```python
+def collect_video_links(driver):
+
+ #Define an empty list to store the video links
+ collected_links = []
+
+ #Find all video elements that contain the video links
+ links = driver.find_elements(By.XPATH, "//a[@class = 'video-item--a']")
+
+ #For each link, get the href attribute and add it to the list
+ for link in links:
+ href = link.get_attribute("href")
+ if href not in collected_links:
+ collected_links.append(href)
+
+ return collected_links
+
+video_links = collect_video_links(driver)
+print(video_links[:3])
+```
+
+```bash
+['https://rumble.com/v6ri2ut--01-04-2025-makeleio.gr.html', 'https://rumble.com/v6rjszf--why-the-medias-bombshell-deportation-story-is-one-big-lie.html', 'https://rumble.com/v6ro0xt-stock-market-bloodbath-after-china-places-34-tariff-on-us-trump-holds-firm-.html']```
+```
+
+If we want to **retrieve the video items for multiple pages**, we can do so by utilising keyboard actions to simulate user behaviour like scrolling. At the bottom of the trending page, there are page elements we can scroll to and click. Ultimately, we want to create a loop that goes through the pages and stores the video links. There are again multiple viable ways to do this, either specifying the number of pages we want to retrieve data from or the number of videos we want to retrieve. In this case, we loop over the pages until we reach the number of videos links that have been defined. We want to fetch the 50 most viewed videos of the last week.
+
+In prior versions of the Selenium python package, many user actions like scrolling were performed by letting the WebDriver execute some lines of JavaScript code. Now, most common actions are nicely wrapped and easily executable through Python directly. Here, we need the “ActionsChains” classes and utilise the `scroll_to_element()`.
+
+```python
+from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
+
+def collect_multiple_pages(driver,limit:int=50):
+
+ video_links = []
+
+ # Iterate over as many pages as needed to fetch the desired number of video links
+ while len(video_links) < limit:
+ # Scroll to the "Next" button to ensure it's in view
+ button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,"//li[@class='paginator--li paginator--li--next']")
+ ActionChains(driver)\
+ .scroll_to_element(button)\
+ .perform()
+ # Use the collect_video_links function to get video links from the current page
+ page_video_links = collect_video_links(driver)
+ # Add the new video links to the list
+ video_links.extend(page_video_links)
+ button.click()
+
+ return video_links
+
+
+video_items = collect_multiple_pages(driver,limit=50)
+```
+
+## Automate search queries
+
+Before turning to the detailed video data, we introduce one last core method for interacting with web pages via Selenium – sending keys or input. Whenever we have an input element like a search bar or a form to fill out, we can send user input automatically and thus automate a variety of processes. In this case, we want to utilise the search bar, insert a search query, and simulate a key press “ENTER” to automate the search on Rumble.
+
+
+
+_Screenshot of Rumble’s search bar with its associated DOM element_
+
+```python
+from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
+
+def search_query(driver,query:str):
+
+ # Find the search input by its attribute
+ search_bar = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//input[@type="search"]')
+
+ # Send your query
+ search_bar.send_keys(query)
+
+ # press Enter to submit the search
+ search_bar.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
+
+# Our search query is "trump tarrifs"
+search_query(driver,"trump tarrifs")
+```
+By default, the resulting page will show the most relevant results based on your query. The same filter options we have introduced on the trending page apply here. You can now use the `collect_multiple_pages()` function to iterate over the result pages and collect the video links.
+
+## Collect video information
+
+After we have collected video links from the trending page or through our search query, we can now inspect a single video page for relevant data points.
+
+
+
+_Screenshot of a single video page with relevant metrics and data points _
+
+For every video, Rumble provides a breadth of information we can collect. However, unlike datapoints such as the title or the author channel, much of the information is presented in a user-friendly way unfit for analyses. For instance, the view count is not a classic integer but abbreviated with a capital K to signify 680,000 views – so are the likes and dislikes for that video. Even after inspection of the DOM, one realises that we need to convert this data to make it usable for analysis.
+
+We can create a function that fetches the view count and – depending on the letter – converts it to its associated integer value.
+
+```python
+ def collect_view_count(driver):
+ #Find the view count element using its XPath
+ view_count = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//div[@class="media-description-info-views"]').get_attribute('outerText')
+
+ # If the value is above 1,000 it will be converted to "1K". So we can identify the k in the string.
+ if "K" in view_count:
+ converted_video_count = int(float(view_count.split('K')[0]) * 1000)
+ # If the value is above 1,000,000 it will be converted to "1M". So we can identify the M in the string.
+ elif "M" in view_count:
+ converted_video_count = int(float(view_count.split('M')[0]) * 1000000)
+ # Any value below that is displayed as a classic integer and can be converted directly.
+ else:
+ converted_video_count = int(view_count)
+
+ return converted_video_count
+
+single_video_view_count = collect_view_count(driver)
+print(single_video_view_count)
+```
+
+```bash
+680000
+```
+
+Even after retrieving all visible data from the video page, there is limited insight into the video’s content, especially if it’s an hour-long stream. Luckily, Rumble provides captions we can fetch and store as text for content analyses. We will create a function that finds the element and makes a request with the help of the ‘requests’ Python package. It then encodes the response as text if successful or prints out the error message.
+
+```python
+import requests
+
+def retrieve_captions(driver):
+ # Find the captions track element and store the src attribute
+ src_path = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//track[@kind="captions"]').get_attribute('src')
+
+ # Utilize the requests library to fetch the captions file
+ caption_response = requests.get(src_path)
+
+ # Check if the request was successful (status code 200)
+ if caption_response.status_code == 200:
+ return caption_response.text
+ else:
+ print(f"Error: {caption_response.status_code}")
+ return None
+
+captions = retrieve_captions(driver)
+print(captions[:90])
+```
+
+```bash
+WEBVTT
+00:00:47.340 --> 00:00:49.340
+Welcome, you're listening to the X-22 Report.
+```
+
+With the core methods shown in this tutorial, you are now able to navigate to Rumble or any other website (static or dynamic) with an automated browser and retrieve or interact with its web elements. Beyond this, you can expand the code to fetch more data points from the video page and automatically navigate through the different domains of interest on Rumble. Once your code is ready, you can switch to Python scripts and run them daily for monitoring purposes.
+
+## Advanced usage
+
+The platform’s web page structure is complex, with many metrics and elements posing challenges for data collection. For instance, metrics like the date format depend on the content being a video or a live stream. The display of the description text depends on its length. Rumble channels can also limit the availability of their video’s comment section to logged-in users.
+
+Therefore, we at polisphere have created an open-source Python package called “rumble-scraper” to help you with Rumble’s complexity and data collection obstacles. It includes the capabilities to
+- Collect videos with all filter options from the trending and browse page
+- Collect all visible data points from video pages, including video description and the comment section
+- Log-in with user credentials
+
+
+
+## References
+
+- Balci, U., Patel, J., Balci, B., & Blackburn, J. (2024a). iDRAMA-rumble-2024: A Dataset of Podcasts from Rumble Spanning 2020 to 2022. Workshop Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
+
+- Balci, U., Patel, J., Balci, B., & Blackburn, J. (2024b). Podcast Outcasts: Understanding Rumble’s Podcast Dynamics. arXiv Preprint arXiv:2406.14460.
+
+- Mell-Taylor, Alex. (2021). Rumble Is Still Where the Right Goes to Play. Medium. Retrieved April 09, 2025, from https://aninjusticemag.com/rumble-is-still-where-the-right-goes-to-play-d3fe7df98875.
+
+- Shaughnessy, B., DuBosar, E., Hutchens, M. J., & Mann, I. (2024). An attack on free speech? Examining content moderation, (de-), and (re-) platforming on American right-wing alternative social media. New Media & Society, 14614448241228850. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241228850.
+
+- Thompson, S. (2024). I Traded My News Apps for Rumble, the Right-Wing YouTube. Here’s What I Saw. The New York Times. Retrieved April 09, 2025, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/13/business/rumble-trump-bongino-kirk.html.
+
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