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reSee.it AI Summary
I share the journey of the Babylon Bee, a satire comedy website, as we navigate the complexities of free speech online. Our unexpected clash with Twitter over a joke drew significant attention, even from Elon Musk, highlighting the challenges of censorship in the digital age. This experience is captured in a new documentary by Palladium Pictures, showcasing our role in the evolving landscape of social media and the ongoing debate surrounding satire and free expression.
@RCPolitics - RealClearPolitics
The Bird and the Bee: Satire, Social Media, and Censorship How does a satire comedy website find itself on the front lines of the debate over free speech online? Seth Dillon and his team at the Babylon Bee tell the story of how they unwittingly found themselves at war with Twitter over a joke, eventually garnering the attention of Elon Musk and ushering in a new era for the social media company—in a new documentary from the Palladium Pictures Film Incubator. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/21/the_bird_and_the_bee_satire_social_media_and_censorship.html
Video Transcript AI Summary
We produce around 6 to 8 articles daily, focusing on trending stories. The jury in Donald Trump's hush money case is still deliberating. Babylon Bee, a conservative parody site, has gained significant traction, often reaching more people than The Onion. However, social media platforms have restricted our reach, especially since the 2020 election, impacting our traffic and engagement. We faced censorship for a tweet about Rachel Levine, leading to a Twitter suspension. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he offered to restore our account, promising no censorship of humor. Despite challenges, we aim to continue making people laugh while defending free speech and challenging mainstream narratives. Our goal remains to poke fun at absurdities in society.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: We write anywhere between, you know, 6 8 articles a day. I think I'm going on all the news sites left, right, and center. What are the big stories? What are the big conversations?
Speaker 1: So my job is to make sure that all the funny jokes make it on to the site and all the non funny jokes get brutally murdered every morning.
Speaker 2: Day 1 of deliberations ended today without a verdict in Donald Trump's hush money case.
Speaker 0: These sketches are hilarious.
Speaker 1: The jury passed, I think, two notes to the judge yesterday. And you're like, oh, what did the note say? It's like, we need to watch all 14 seasons of The Apprentice. You're fired.
Speaker 0: It's a conservative parody site, the Babble on
Speaker 3: The funniest parody comedy now is Babylon Bee. Bee is a Christian satire.
Speaker 1: Know who's such the biggest Christians at the time?
Speaker 4: Babylon Bee reaches more people than the onion.
Speaker 5: All nonessential businesses will have to close, and Governor just gave a pretty good recap of what that means.
Speaker 6: What you're seeing behind me is one of multiple locations that have been burning in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the course of
Speaker 1: the You know, we didn't actually believe in the modern day gift of prophecy until we started writing articles, and they started coming true.
Speaker 5: Nobody has done more for Christianity than I have.
Speaker 6: The leader of the free world got duped by the Babylon Bee. The Babylon Bee
Speaker 4: is hugely successful, so, of course, big tech is trying to censor it.
Speaker 7: Our first witness today is Seth Dillon, the CEO of Babylon Bee.
Speaker 8: Could
Speaker 7: you hopefully, the mic's working there on your end.
Speaker 4: Do I have to try? There we go.
Speaker 6: Got it. I'm being censored. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm ready whenever you are. Let's talk about how we're never doing a documentary again. Yeah.
Speaker 0: He's kind of the pretty face that makes us look good out there.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me on your show and giving me a platform from which to misinform your millions of viewers, harmfully and maliciously. I really appreciate it. We're a comedy site, but we've gone beyond just making jokes, telling jokes on the Internet to, like, defending our right to tell jokes on the Internet.
Speaker 6: Back in the day, you could legitimately go viral on Facebook. Our content would go so viral that it would crash servers.
Speaker 4: It would have 100 of shares within minutes and then thousands of shares and then tens of thousands of shares, and that would just drive ridiculous amounts of traffic through to the website, which could then be monetized. We were lucky enough to kind of exist at this time where that was naturally allowed to happen. The change really started with Facebook responding to allegations that they were responsible essentially for Donald Trump getting elected in 2016.
Speaker 9: Facebook has come under fire recently for its role in last year's election.
Speaker 10: During the last presidential election, they did absolutely nothing, and they created a catastrophe.
Speaker 9: Reports have surfaced showing the social networking site was a breeding ground for misinformation.
Speaker 1: The tone turned into Babylon Bee is muddying the waters of fake news and misinformation in order to spread harmful lies about the left.
Speaker 4: The New York Times put it in print that we traffic in misinformation under the guise of satire. That's just false. Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube, and all these other platforms look to these guys, these media outlets, as authoritative sources.
Speaker 1: You noticed a really sharp traffic drop off on Facebook, right, like, on the day of the 2020 election. They were really concerned about fake news after 2016, and they were gonna throw all the levers and switches when it hit the 2020 election.
Speaker 10: The most important thing that they have to do is to change the algorithm, change what goes into it, change how it works.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So Facebook and YouTube and any other social media platform, you'll see something similar. Our reach is just simply being squashed despite the fact that our audience is growing. 2023 was down 20% from 2022. 2024 is down 60% from 2023.
It's insane. I mean, it's like it's like our our business is completely drying up on Facebook. Like, there's no way to drive traffic to our website.
Speaker 1: We saw that, a post on Twitter would get 1,000 and thousands of retweets, and on Facebook, it'd get 20 shares, you know, 30 shares. It was like, well, Twitter's kinda where it's at now in terms of just being part of the conversation.
Speaker 4: There was this shift where the line of attack from, you know, the social platforms and the media really, went from, okay, maybe they're really trying to do humor, but humor can be a vehicle for hatred. At the time, Twitter's mission statement was to provide a platform for free expression without barriers. And then you go to the terms of service, and you find all the barriers.
Speaker 6: Gender ideology, misgendering, not using
Speaker 4: some of these pronouns, dead naming. Like, these were the hot button topics every year. USA Today does something where they highlight a handful of women this this honor of being named woman of the year. And one of their picks was Rachel Levine as this transgender health admiral in the Biden administration, a male person who had transitioned to being, you know, a woman and identified as Rachel
Speaker 11: Levine. In terms of the changes that we see in our society, in our culture, I think that women are those change makers.
Speaker 0: The Rachel Levine tweet was was more mischief than than like a joke. It made our writers laugh for kind of how, audacious it was because you just weren't supposed to do that. And and
Speaker 1: it was kind of a running bit for us.
Speaker 0: Every year we make Trump our Christian of the year. I wrote it. I posted it. And I'll never forget Kyle Mann calling me and saying, bro, I think you're gonna get us kicked off at Twitter. And me thinking, I wonder if I should run that by Seth.
Speaker 3: Twitter's written policies prohibit misgendering. Full stop. And the Babylon Bee, in the name of satire, misgendered admiral Rachel Levine.
Speaker 4: The shares started going up, the likes started to go up,
Speaker 6: and then pause. All of a sudden, nobody can log in to the Twitter account anymore. We can't post anything. It's like, what's going on?
Speaker 3: We landed on the side of enforcing our rules as written.
Speaker 4: I screenshotted the notice that we got from Twitter, and I sent it. And I said, guys, you know, we've got a choice to make. They want us to delete this tweet. And the way they presented it to us, they're like, we had to admit that what we shared was hate speech.
Speaker 1: It's this penance that you have to do. Like, go click delete on the tweet and, you know, say 5 pale Twitters or whatever.
Speaker 0: We're gonna lose our our reach on Twitter. Our business is gonna tank, and it's gonna be Joel's fault. And, and I'm gonna I'm gonna have to find another job writing stupid headlines somewhere else. I don't know where you do that.
Speaker 1: Our entire business model is to write funny articles and put them on Facebook and Twitter. And all of a sudden, Facebook has crushed us. Twitter has removed us. It is
Speaker 0: such an easy thing to do to just say, okay, guys. Like, let's delete it. Let's move on. Let's keep the ball rolling. Because everyone does that.
Speaker 4: People need to be willing to say what they believe, what they think is true. They need to be willing to make jokes that they're not supposed to make because if they can't, then they're not really free. This isn't a platform for free expression without barriers. Like, it was just, like, a no
Speaker 6: brainer to me. Like, we can't delete this.
Speaker 4: After I got that feedback from the guys, I'm, like, alright. Well, that's it. This is our decision. We're not deleting it. And I went out there and I tweeted.
Speaker 1: In no universe will we ever delete this tweet. If I ever delete this tweet, you can kill me. You couldn't really, mince words about how he about how he made that statement. So there wasn't really any room for us to delete, which is good. You're gonna follow through on it or else you'll you'll look like an idiot.
Speaker 8: Twitter suspended the account of the massively popular Christian satire site, the Babylon Bee.
Speaker 4: The Babylon Bee, they're gonna be off Twitter because of a tweet about Rachel Levine.
Speaker 1: I'm Kyle with the Babylon Bee. Yeah. We're still in Twitter jail. I'm digging a tunnel behind this poster. As soon as I finish it, I'll be as free as the Taliban, Vladimir Putin, and all the other wonderful people who are still out on Twitter.
I would like to make the following statement about Twitter. Twitter is Twitter is the best website of all time. I just love Twitter. I love it this much.
Speaker 4: Couple of days after we initially got suspended, we received a DM from Elon Musk. Said, hey, have you guys been suspended from Twitter? And, of course, we couldn't respond to him because we were locked out of our account. Suspended from Twitter.
Speaker 6: Elon was one of the biggest voices that kind
Speaker 4: of, like, emerged from this as as, like, this
Speaker 6: is really dangerous. Freedom of speech is really at risk right now, and his platform of choice was always Twitter.
Speaker 1: Is someone you don't like allowed to say something you don't like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.
Speaker 4: He had a phone conversation with Kyle, and he it was just like a fact finding call.
Speaker 1: He asked, like, what our plan was. Oh, you're gonna delete the tweet, and then, well, maybe I'll just buy Twitter.
Speaker 4: I thought it was a joke. You know? Like, he wasn't really seriously considering buying Twitter because of this problem. You know? But apparently, he was.
Speaker 0: Elon Musk has bought nearly 10% of Twitter for an investment of around $3,000,000,000.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Twitter.
Speaker 2: If he buys our free speech platform, people will be able to have free speech on our platform. Now to some news.
Speaker 5: It is now a done deal.
Speaker 8: After revolutionizing the space race and electric cars, the world's richest man is now promising a Twitter makeover. Elon Musk carried a kitchen sink into Twitter HQ this week, tweeting let that sink in.
Speaker 4: That very day that he took over, you know, he sent me a message. He DM'd me at, like, 4:30 in the morning and said, do you want the Babylon Bee restored? There will be no censorship of humor.
Speaker 1: I don't think he realized how much resistance there was gonna be from within Twitter.
Speaker 4: The trust and safety team was saying, look. You can't you can't just arbitrarily unban or unlock somebody.
Speaker 3: There was always something we could point to that said, this is how we are operating. And then all of a sudden, that didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 0: Then it
Speaker 3: was reinstate some of these accounts.
Speaker 4: Rules are rules for reason. You have to enforce them fairly. He's like, you know, why can't I do that? It's like a presidential pardon. He'll let me part of them.
Speaker 1: Like Luke Skywalker busting down the prison cell door and we're we're princess Leia and Elon bust in. There's no undertones there. Don't read anything into that.
Speaker 5: It's a little short for Stormtrooper.
Speaker 1: I don't remember which one of us got in first, but someone said it's live. We can get in. And I pull up my phone. I see the little blinking cursor on the post button. Like, you feel so much power surging through
Speaker 0: your face. Suddenly, we were unbanned, and we were like, oh, crap. Gotta do something funny now. Like, think of something really funny. Someone pitched the Babylon b tests whether gay gay retard Elon Musk still cares about free speech.
And, and we thought, oh, you know, let's hold hold off on that one. Yeah. We just stole Elon Musk's joke. You know, we figured that we can't go wrong with that.
Speaker 6: We got invited to Twitter headquarters.
Speaker 1: The Babylon Bee at Twitter headquarters. Oh, and Elon Musk is there too.
Speaker 6: You know, Elon greeted us. He's like, the barbarians have stormed the castle.
Speaker 7: We're in, and we're pillaging the merch.
Speaker 1: We wanted to give you something, actually. To restore the liberty of the peace was very expensive, guys. Do you feel like it was worth it? I mean, do you ever regret it and
Speaker 0: go, why did I do
Speaker 1: this thing just to make a stand for free speech? Or I think it was necessary. I think it's gonna turn out to be important.
Speaker 4: We learned the hard way that censorship guards the narrative, not the truth. In fact, it guards the narrative at the expense of the truth. But the law only protects against government censorship. It hasn't caught up to the fact that the vast majority of public discourse now takes place on privately owned platforms. So where is the law that protects us from them?
Now you have all of these different pressures on these platforms to try to get them to censor.
Speaker 6: It used to be that, you know, you were defending somebody's right again to get up on a soapbox and and speak to a crowd. But now those crowds are online, and your soapbox is your Twitter profile.
Speaker 7: That issue really is the question of, does the first amendment protect these companies from curating content? Are they like newspapers? They can publish anything they want and make editorial decisions. Or are they like the old phone company, common carriers, required by law to carry everybody's message whether they like it or not?
Speaker 4: And the government applies, pressure through the backdoor saying, look, you know, you're allowing too much misinformation to spread.
Speaker 7: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg claims he was pressured by the White House to censor content related to COVID 19 during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg saying, I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.
Speaker 4: Like, you already see Brazil and
Speaker 6: Australia and other countries fighting Elon tooth and nail and kinda like putting him on the spot demanding that he remove content at their request and stuff, and he's fighting them. But how long can that go on before those governments shut it down?
Speaker 9: A Brazilian supreme court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer access or use it.
Speaker 4: The advertisers have so much control because of the amount of money that they wield. If they decide that you're not censoring enough, they can say, hey, look. We're not gonna spend money with you anymore because you're not censoring to our liking.
Speaker 2: On that note, questions?
Speaker 12: What responsibility do you think the current advertisers have? What would you encourage them to do? Should they all just leave? Do you think they can be a force for change?
Speaker 3: I think advertisers are one of the most powerful forces influencing social media, and I believe they can use that power to affect positive change. I would encourage them to use it. All of the criticism, there was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob. I got a Stop.
Speaker 7: You hope Don't advertise.
Speaker 3: You don't want them to advertise? No.
Speaker 7: What do you mean? If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.
Speaker 4: The answer can't be that we have to wait around for 1 of the richest men or a group of the richest men in the world to come and buy the platform and say, say, no, we don't care about your advertiser dollars. We don't care if the government's trying to apply pressure on us. We're gonna safeguard speech at all costs. What are the chances of that ever happening? I can't believe it happened once.
We certainly can't count on it ever happening again. The comedian's job is to poke holes in the popular narrative. If the popular narrative is off limits, then comedy itself is off limits, and that's basically where we find ourselves today.
Speaker 0: Our speech is restricted to the point where we can't even joke about the insane ideas that
Speaker 4: are being imposed on us from the to the point where we can't even joke about the insane ideas that are being imposed on us from the top down. The only reason Twitter is now an exception is because the world's richest man took matters into his own hands and declared comedy legal again.
Speaker 0: Did you guys see that the former CEO of Taco Bell has taken over Cracker Barrel? That's kind of funny.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have, like, Doritos Locos Fried Chicken. Locos Chicken Fried Steak. The bee has always been a group of guys smoking cigars in the garage, goofing around.
Speaker 0: The bee is just going to continue to do what the bee does and throw bombs and be silly and will stay on as long as they'll let us.
Speaker 4: I wanna continue to make people laugh, but I also wanna continue to make them think about the importance of safeguarding the right to go out of lockstep with whatever the popular narrative is and challenge it and poke and poke holes in it and refute it and, yes, even ridicule it when necessary.