Twitter maliciously nuked The Babylon Bee’s account over the weekend for poking fun at the leftist media’s elevation of biological men as “women of the year” but the popular satire site isn’t giving into Big Tech’s demands that it delete true statements.
The Babylon Bee was first locked out of its account on Sunday after it posted an article claiming “The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine.” The article simply pointed out that a male is a male and that awarding the male United States Assistant Secretary for Health an award designed for women is absurd, but Twitter rushed to shut down the page under its “hateful conduct” policy.
“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,” Twitter claimed.
Twitter demanded that the Bee’s creators delete the tweet or risk being indefinitely banned from posting, liking, or commenting.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon could have easily ordered his team to comply with Twitter, delete the tweet, and restore the account, which has 1.3 million followers and generates thousands of likes every day. Instead, he publicly proclaimed that the Bee would not censor itself to gain approval from and access to the leftist platform.
“We’re not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it,” Dillon wrote.
Before Twitter waged a war on the Bee, Facebook tried to demonetize the satire site in 2020 for spoofing Sen. Mazie Hirono’s comments during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings because the social media oligarchs claimed it “incited violence.”
Once again, instead of caving to Facebook’s demands that the Bee edit out parts of the article that the Zuckerberg company deemed problematic, the Bee’s creators sacrificed its Facebook-based income to stand by the article.
“They’re asking us to edit the article and not speak publicly about internal content reviews. Oops, did I just tweet this?” Dillon tweeted.
In the same thread, he clarified that “we will not be editing the article to get our page’s monetization reinstated.”
It’s a lesson that every conservative on Twitter and other tech platforms needs to learn.
Twitter is a historically bad and partisan actor that knowingly suppresses true information. Just this week, The New York Times stealthily admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was collectively throttled by the propaganda press and Big Tech oligarchs, is indeed legitimate. When the New York Post first reported on Hunter’s corruption in October 2020, Twitter was the first company to lock the Post’s account and quash anyone who tried to interact with the article.
Science shows men and women are different. Any claims by Rachel Levine, swimmer Lia Thomas, or the industries that willfully erase women’s spaces to accommodate science-denying men are bogus and deserve to be called out. The Bee did the right thing by standing up for truth, and anyone who wants to preserve it must do the same.
Big Tech companies will force you into doing and saying whatever they want if you don’t object. Psychologist Jordan Peterson, who resigned from his tenured position at the University of Toronto due to increasing wokeness, said as much about the tyranny that has dominated public policy for the last two years.
“Things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time,” Peterson explained. “I’m going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest, then I’m going to stop. And I’m going to wait. Then you’re going to come down. Then I’m going to encroach again right to the point where you protest, and I’m going to stop. Then I’m going to wait. And I’m just going to do that forever, and before you know it you’re going to be back three miles from where you started and you’ll have done it one step at a time. … I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone and you agreed.”
Refusing to cede fundamental ground to Twitter in the battle for truth won’t stop you from getting censored, suppressed, or even banned. But it won’t allow Twitter to redefine norms “one tiny step at a time.” If your account is under attack from Twitter, take a lesson from The Babylon Bee.
As Dillon said: “Never censor yourself. Insist that 2 and 2 make 4 even if Twitter tries to compel you to say otherwise. Make them ban tens of millions of us.”
