Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon on Why Twitter Locked Account
CLAY: Right now, the Babylon Bee is locked out of its Twitter account over I believe it was a joke surrounding the HHS commissioner of some level in the Biden administration that may have also involved Lia Thomas. I’m not sure exactly. Let’s bring in Seth and find out what the latest is there. Seth, what was the joke, what was the headline? You guys do fantastic work. And what is Twitter doing? Kind of fill in our audience.
DILLON: Great question. First of all, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
BUCK: Thanks for being with us.
DILLON: Yes, Rachel Levine was named one of the Women of the Year by USA Today.
CLAY: Yes.
DILLON: And we did a satirical take on that where we actually selected Rachel Levine as our pick for Man of the Year. And Twitter didn’t like that very much. That ran afoul of their hateful conduct policy, where we misgendered somebody and targeted an individual for “misgendering.” So they flagged that post and told us that we can only unlock our account if we delete that post, and basically what they’re saying is we go through this form — we have to fill out this form — and acknowledge that we did in fact violate the hateful conduct policy and take down the tweet. Otherwise, our account remains blocked.
BUCK: Seth, what’s your position on this right now? A lot of people I know in the past have just said, “Oh, fine. I’ll delete the offending tweet.” Are you taking a hard line one way or the other on this?
DILLON: Well, we feel kind of obligated to. There’s a situation here where we have to make a choice. We have to choose between, like, keeping this platform and the audience we’re connected to through this platform or standing by our principles, and it’s a situation where they want us to basically affirm something that we don’t affirm — or deny something that we want to affirm, that a man is a man.
And so in order to do that, to delete the tweet ourselves? Twitter… This is the thing, Twitter could delete this tweet if they want to, because they don’t want it on their platform. Why are they making us do it? This is about submission. It’s about ideological conformity. It’s about forcing us, compelling us to go along with their definitions and their understanding of reality. And we disagree with that. And so there’s kind of like this, how could we in good conscience delete this thing? We had an internal discussion and decided we couldn’t.
BUCK: Seth, I’m also curious, does a human being from Twitter engage with you on this? Is there a rep you can call or someone you can talk to to try to appeal this, or is it just all kind of form email and messages saying this is the deal?
DILLON: Well, initially, when they notify you of these things, it’s an automated email that goes out. Whether a human actually reviews this before that email was triggered or not, I have no idea. We haven’t been contacted by Twitter yet up to this point. There’s now a lot of media attention on this, as you’re aware.
We were trending throughout most of the day this morning on Twitter. So we may yet get contacted by them. We’re seeking out contacts over there to talk to somebody over there. But they do have an appeal process that we can try to go through, which we’ll pursue. We don’t hold out high hopes for that to work out in our favor.
CLAY: Seth, I ran a media company, as you know, at OutKick for a while. I know how valuable referral traffic can be from social media accounts. So whenever these companies — whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whoever it might be — takes action against individual content providers like the Babylon Bee or OutKick, that has a significant impact in terms of the revenue and site traffic that can be generated. What does Twitter shutting down, effectively, the Babylon Bee’s account do to your ability to monetize your content?
DILLON: Man, it’s huge. It’s hard to overstate it. Twitter is not our top traffic refer. But it’s one of them. We’ve long since been… We’ve driven more traffic through Facebook than we do through Twitter. It’s just more geared towards that. People tend to stay on Twitter more and retweet things, and then click through to the links that you’ve posted there.
But you’re part of the conversation when you’re on Twitter. This is where public discourse happens. This is where all the people who will never migrate to Parler and Gettr and alternative platforms — Gab and the like — they’re staying on Twitter. That’s where the conversation is. That’s where a lot of these government officials are. Probably all the government officials at this point are on Twitter.
So public discourse is taking place there. When you are removed from that, you’re ostracized and removed from the discussions that matter. It’s very costly. Even beyond traffic, it’s costly in terms of… We have, for example, Elon Musk is a fan of ours and he engages with our content regularly.
He’s not on the alternative platforms. He’s on Twitter. So if we’re not on Twitter anymore, we are no longer being engaged with and in front of prominent people with large followings. So the damage that it does, not just to our traffic itself but just our brand and being relevant, it’s huge. Big cost.
CLAY: First of all, I admire you for standing on principle because I think you’re right here, and Twitter does need to be held accountable for its arbitrary and capricious rules as it applies to them.
DILLON: Yeah.
CLAY: How long are you prepared to continue this battle? We talk with Alex Berenson all the time; Twitter kicked him off. You aren’t officially kicked off, certainly. But if you don’t delete this tweet, it’s a de facto kicking off, right, of your brand. How long could this go on, from your perspective?
DILLON: Well, that’s a good question. We feel pretty committed to not deleting the tweet. So we’re kind of at this impasse. We’re just staring each other down right now. Let’s see how Twitter responds. We’ll see how the appeal goes. Of course, we’re bringing a lot of media spotlight to this. I’ll be on Tucker Carlson tonight talking about it.
The thing that’s important to us is that we generate enough support from our readers. We have lots of loyal readers. We have a large email list. We’re appealing to them to subscribe and support us, because this could be a long fight. This could draw out for years. I don’t know when we’ll be…
There may come a time where the law changes or the Supreme Court weighs in on this and Twitter is compelled to let us back on the platform. I don’t know. But I’m not calling for any kind of government regulatory scheme or anything. I’m just saying it could go on for a long time. So we do need support from our readers to carry us through.
BUCK: Yeah, Seth, we wanted to ask about that, exactly. Because, look, I make no secret of this. I think you guys do hilarious work on a regular basis. You guys do great stuff over at the Babylon Bee that is really helpful. As conservative commentators, I feel there’s so little comedy out there. So when we find people who do it well and do real comedy, real parody, real satire, we want to support it. And you guys at the Bee — guys and gals — certainly do that. Where can folks go and how do people make sure they see some of the brilliant stuff you put out there, even if, say, Twitter holds firm?
DILLON: Hmm. I think the best way… None of these social platforms allow you to own the relationship. You don’t have an actual relationship with them where you take them with you wherever you go. I would say the best thing to do is get on the email list. If you’re not able to be a paid subscriber, the next best thing, get on the email list.
And then we have direct communication with you outside of the algorithms and the Big Tech centers who are trying to limit what you can see and what you can say. So I would encourage everyone to do that. You can join on our website or even on our Twitter page, which is still up. It’s not been taken down. We just can’t tweet there. We have a link to sign up to the newsletter right there at the top of the page.
CLAY: Here’s our request, because I’m going to help you guys as best I can, and you guys have a lot of great stories and headlines. When you know you have one that I would love that I might not otherwise see, text it to me and I will share it with my audience to help continue to spread the word of your brand.
Because I know how incredibly frustrating it is when that firehose effect that you get from your social media accounts, they suddenly turn it off because of something that you’ve said that they disagree with. It happened all the time to us at OutKick and it happens to a lot of people out there who are fighting the good fight on a day-to-day basis.
DILLON: Amen. I appreciate that offer. I will take you up on that. We do need more sportswriters who can do comedy from the perspective of looking at and satirizing and doing parody of the sports world. But I’ll take you up on that and I appreciate your support. We really need it.
BUCK: That’s Dillon of the Babylon Bee, making good jokes and fighting the good fight for free speech. Thanks so much, Seth. We appreciate it.
DILLON: Thank you.
