Twitter Apologizes For Suspending the Babylon Bee’s Account ‘By Mistake’

Twitter has apologized to the conservative satirical website the Babylon Bee for wrongfully suspending its account after accidentally flagging it as spam Monday night.

The Babylon Bee’s editor-in-chief Kyle Mann shared an email from Twitter on his personal account Monday night detailing the suspension. The email read, “Your account, TheBabylonBee has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam. You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.”

The account, which has nearly 550,000 followers, was suspended at 6 p.m. E.S.T. on Monday before being reinstated less than an hour later. 

A second email from Twitter apologized for the wrongful suspension, saying “We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you back on Twitter soon. A little background: We have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake.”

After being reinstated, the Bee tweeted in jest, “We are back. Twitter destroyed our headquarters with a drone strike, but we are being assured it was an honest mistake.”

Conservatives criticized the brief suspension, creating a #FreeTheBee campaign on Twitter and accusing the site of censoring conservative voices. The Babylon Bee, which was founded in 2016, describes itself as a “Christian News Satire” site and is seen as a conservative alternative to The Onion. 

The Babylon Bee was one of multiple conservative satire and parody accounts suspended by Twitter recently, including Titania McGrath, NPC Daily, Liberal Larry, and Jarvis DuPont.