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After Twitter censored the account of satirical news site The Babylon Bee for joking about Rachel Levine’s gender identity, the personal account of its editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, was also blocked. The move came after he joked about the platform’s double standards using the Uyghur genocide in China as a reference.
“Maybe they’ll let us into our The Babylon Bee account on Twitter if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp,” Mann’s joke about the digital media’s censorship read.
By Twitter’s standards, Mann’s joke violated rules on “hateful conduct,” so the platform intends to force him to delete the post as a condition for his account access to be returned to him.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who recently refused to delete the tweet for which his satirical site’s account was censored, posted a screenshot of the ultimatum Twitter placed against Mann.
And, in the face of censorship, more jokes
For his part, the site’s creator, Adam Ford, also reacted to the blocking of Mann’s account: “So, literally perpetuating genocide won’t get you kicked off Twitter, but making jokes criticizing those who do, will,” Ford tweeted. “Got it.”
And since the humor doesn’t stop, the site itself reacted to the censorship of its posts with a joke: “Taliban spokesperson finally kicked off Twitter after sharing Babylon Bee headline,” it says in one of its latest creations.
The famous Babylon Bee parody account, Not the Bee, also created by Ford, gave coverage of the censorship against Mann with a satirical comment, “I guess it’s OK to put people in concentration camps, just not to JOKE about it.”
This is not the first time the Babylon Bee has been the victim of censorship by major tech platforms. In the past, Dillon has denounced Big Tech for silencing his publication for “political reasons,” and told Tucker Carlson on Fox News that there’s nothing “tyrants” hate more than humor.
