WILL BABYLON BEE GET OUT OF TWITTER JAIL? Those who are cheering on Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter often cite the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story or the ban on former President Donald Trump as examples of Twitter’s violations of basic tenets of free speech. But there is another case of Twitter censorship that is just as compelling, that is going on right at this moment, and that may have played a part in Musk’s decision.
It’s the case of the Babylon Bee. Twitter locked the humor website out of its account on March 20, and the account has remained locked ever since. Twitter said the Babylon Bee violated its “hateful conduct” policy with a tweet that declared Dr. Rachel Levine, a senior Biden administration official who is transgender, the Babylon Bee’s “Man of the Year.” The tweet was a play on USA Today’s inclusion of Levine as one of its “Women of the Year.” Levine, born male and originally named Richard Levine, lived as a man until roughly the age of 50.
Twitter’s policy forbids users from referring to Levine as a man. To do so is “hateful conduct.” In a new interview for my podcast, the Babylon Bee’s CEO, Seth Dillon, described the publication’s effort to persuade Twitter to reverse its decision. First, the Babylon Bee, which is, after all, a humor website, argued that the tweet, like all of its other tweets, was a joke. Then it argued that, in any event, the tweet was true.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
“It was satire,” Dillon told me. “This was a joke. We cited as the basis of the story the USA Today piece naming Rachel Levine ‘Woman of the Year.’ So we stated that this is satire. And then we stated the fact that a biologically male person is a man. That’s what a man is, by definition. If you go to the dictionary and look up the word ‘man,’ it means a male person, a male adult human. So Rachel Levine is a male adult human. I don’t know that it is hate speech to state that fact.”
Neither argument worked. Twitter said the Babylon Bee would remain locked out until it deleted the tweet. Dillon said no. The transgender issue, he felt, offered a particularly compelling opportunity to debate the issue of compelled speech. “I think this is a good moment to take a stand, simply because we are dealing with basic biological facts,” Dillon said. “It’s like Twitter trying to demand that you say two and two make five, instead of four. And I don’t think we help ourselves — in fact, I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we go along with their trying to force us to say that two and two make five.”
The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet. The Babylon Bee stayed in Twitter jail. It’s still there now.
Twitter’s action marked a new course in the effort by the establishment and social media to attack and limit the reach of the Babylon Bee, which, with its conservative orientation, has become beloved on the Right for poking fun at liberal shibboleths.
A few years ago, the Babylon Bee was the target of what might be called fact-check harassment. For example, in March 2018, the Babylon Bee published a story headlined, “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication.” It was funny, and it was a mild barb at CNN, but it was not literally true: CNN did not, in fact, buy an industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news. It was a joke. Nevertheless, the online site Snopes did a “fact check” on the story and originally declared it false. On the basis of that, Facebook then limited the distribution of the story and imposed limits on the Babylon Bee’s ability to make money. Facebook later withdrew the action and apologized.
In September 2020, with a Supreme Court nomination battle brewing, the Babylon Bee published a story headlined, “Ninth Circuit Overturns Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Yes, that, too, was a joke. Ginsburg had died, and the ultraliberal 9th Circuit did not bring her back. Yet USA Today actually performed a fact check on the story, going into a long discussion of the 9th Circuit’s jurisprudence, before declaring the piece “satire.”
It was embarrassing — for the fact-checkers. Dillon and his crew mocked them up and down, which they richly deserved. But the mockery led to a change in tactics among those seeking to rein in the Babylon Bee. “That line of attack failed because the fact checks were so ridiculous,” Dillon said. “They just shifted focus and went after the hate speech angle. So now, it’s all about ‘hateful conduct,’ which we saw with the Rachel Levine story.”
Twitter and other social media networks have policies prohibiting “hateful conduct.” And they, of course, get to decide what that means. “They’ve baked into their terms what counts as ‘hateful conduct,'” Dillon said. “And it’s not as simple as us saying, ‘Well, this is satire.’ They account for that in their terms. Facebook has released an update on their satire policy saying that satire can be a vehicle for hatred disguised as comedy. And so the motives and intent of the satire have to be looked at, and we have to determine whether or not it was hateful in its intent. So now you get into all these subjective judgments about whether or not we were intending to be hateful.”
The goal, of course, is to de-platform the Babylon Bee altogether. And that is where Musk comes in. At some point during Musk’s process of deciding to buy Twitter, he got in touch with Dillon at the Babylon Bee. Dillon will not say exactly what they discussed, but he will say that Musk wanted to confirm that Twitter had, in fact, banned the Babylon Bee over the Levine tweet. Dillon confirmed that that was indeed the case.
“I do think that we played a small role in it, but I don’t know how significant that role is,” Dillon said. “There’s a very good possibility that the Bee getting banned on Twitter was kind of a last straw for Musk. He did appear to be weighing his options and looking at making a move on Twitter. He saw this as being a problem. It certainly bothered him that we got suspended.”
So now, if Musk’s purchase deal goes through, it seems guaranteed the Babylon Bee will be free to tweet again. That is one small blow for freedom of speech. But the big picture is still not a happy one. Yes, it is a good thing that one humor website, fighting for its right to speech on one social media platform, appears to have been rescued by the world’s richest man. But how often will that happen? What will it do to end the suppression of speech elsewhere?
Not a lot — unless it inspires others to keep pushing back against the censors. “I personally welcome the battle,” Dillon said. “I care a lot about the preservation of freedom and the restoration of sanity. What we did in all of this was just to refuse to delete a tweet. We refused to delete a tweet, and look what has come about as a result of that — possibly, at least, we played a role in it. That’s pretty remarkable. Hopefully, other people see that, and we’ll have more people joining the ranks of those who are refusing to go along with the insanity and standing up for reason and truth and freedom. And we’ll start to see the pendulum swing back the other way. We’ll be in that fight until the fight is over, which is, I guess, until we die.”
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
