The site named Rachel Levine, a transgender cabinet member, ‘Man of the Year.’
The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, was locked out of Twitter Sunday for a satirical post that named transgender U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine “Man of the Year.”
Twitter claimed that the article violated its rules against “hateful conduct” when it notified the Bee that its account had been frozen.
“You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” the notice read.
Twitter has reportedly promised to restore the account in 12 hours but only under the condition that the Bee deletes the tweet it has deemed problematic.
Despite the obstacles, the Bee’s leadership has doubled-down, saying that they’re committed to exposing the truth even if it comes at a steep price. For example, the Bee is likely to suffer a significant loss of web traffic, much of which is generated on Twitter.
“We regularly go viral on Twitter and we get a lot of engagement there. That’s where we connect with people like Elon Musk. There’s a high cost to lose our Twitter account but you’re between a rock and a hard place. You have to choose between keeping your following and keeping your principles,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon told National Review.
The offending post came two days after USA Today named Levine, a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps, one of its “Women of the year.” The Biden administration has celebrated Levine for becoming the first “woman” to rise to the rank of four-star admiral.
Twitter’s demands inherently demand ideological surrender, Dillon said. Rather than remove the tweet themselves, Twitter makes you “bend the knee and admit wrongdoing by deleting the Tweet,” he said. Dillon noted that the alleged offender must literally “check a box” to agree that they renounce the flagged content in order to liberate their account.
“It’s not just that expressing these views is not allowed, you have to deny that you meant it. They want you to concede something. They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold,” he added.
In the meantime, the Bee will pursue the appeal process with Twitter. Under the platform’s disciplinary protocol, the Bee’s account has only technically been locked, rather than suspended or permanently banned. So Twitter is giving the Bee an option to get out of jail, but that would require compromising its values, Dillon said.
“The problem is social media networks are increasing adopting this stance that satire can be hateful depending on the target audience,” Dillon said.
“We at @TheBabylonBee stated the fact that a man is a man, through satire, and got locked out of this platform for it. We are living in a clown world,” Babylon Bee Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann tweeted Sunday.
The company’s Twitter banishment comes on the heels of the NCAA women’s swim championship in Atlanta this past weekend, where transgender athlete Lia Thomas competed against female swimmers, winning multiple titles and beating two Olympic medalists.
Thomas’s victory triggered outrage from many female athletes in the pool, as well as their parents, who felt like their chances of placing in the tournament and advancing to the finals were stolen. Former Olympian and Virginia Tech female swimmer Reka Gyorgy was the first athlete to openly condemn the NCAA’s policy allowing biologically male swimmers to compete against women in a letter Sunday. The Bee published a related satire article on Friday titled, “NCAA Swimming Champ Caught In Possession Of Performance-Enhancing Testicles.”
The Bee has a long history of targeting by social media censors. In a digital landscape dominated by tech titans, the Bee’s marketing strategy and even profitability is inextricably linked to their platforms, which can boot any company they accuse of foul play more-or-less arbitrarily. As the Bee’s popularity has exploded in just a few years, its content and the way it is circulated has come under heightened scrutiny from progressive companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
For years now, Snopes.com, formerly a reliable page for debunking myths and sorting out fact from fiction on the Internet, has effectively been smearing the Bee as “fake news” despite the fact that the content is explicitly advertised as parody. Snopes created a new rating a few years ago, “Labeled Satire,” to suggest that some jokes do not qualify as satire and can be misleading to audiences.
In 2018, Facebook threatened to cut off the Bee’s ad revenue pipeline after Snopes fact-checked a satire article headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”
Dillon said many followers have asked how they can help combat the cancellation attempts the Bee regularly faces. His message emphasized grassroots resistance: “Stop censoring yourself and continue to say what’s true even if it has consequences. Make them ban tens of millions of us.”