Twitter told The Babylon Bee they violated their rules against hateful conduct, saying, “You may no 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.”
Although the post was published on The Babylon Bee’s website and not their non-fake news site, Not the Bee, Dillon alluded to the idea that what they said wasn’t meant to be taken as satire by saying they weren’t deleting the post.
“Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it,” Dillion 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,” Dillon wrote after he was asked how The Babylon Bee supporters could help.
Dillon said that email service providers have censored them as well, but at least getting on that list is something the company owns and not the provider. “Get on our email list so we have direct contact with you. It’s not a perfect solution—email service providers have censored us, too—but at least we own our email list and can take it with us.”
The solution Dillon offered was to “Become a premium subscriber. If enough of you do that, we won’t need traffic from big tech platforms to generate revenue.” This is something The Babylon Bee’s previous owner, Adam Ford, attempted to do after he sold the company and created the Christian Daily Reporter, a Christian news site that was independent of all social media. Ford later changed the name to Disrn before joining forces with The Babylon Bee to create Not the Bee at the end of August 2020—which relaunched Ford back into the social media dependent world.
The Babylon Bee poked fun at the Twitter lockout with an article they published on Monday titled, “Babylon Bee Writers Struggling To Come Up With New Material After Twitter Bans 1 Of Their 2 Jokes.”
They joked about not knowing what they are going to do because jokes referencing men identifying as women make up most of their material and said that they might have to bring back Ford.
“Leadership at the company warned their workers that if they don’t come up with a new joke soon, they may have to bring back founder Adam Ford to turn things around,” the article said.
