Facebook has demonetized Christian satire site the Babylon Bee, saying even after a manual review that an article which used a popular Monty Python bit to skewer Senate questioning of Trump’s Supreme Court pick “incites violence.”
The social media behemoth told Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon that it “stood by” the decision to not only remove the article but demonetize the Bee’s entire page on Tuesday, insisting the piece – headlined “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against a Duck To See if She Is a Witch” – “incites violence,” Dillon revealed on Twitter.
So after a manual review, Facebook says they stand by their decision to pull down this article and demonetize our page. I’m not kidding. They say this article “incites violence.” It’s literally a regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie!https://t.co/U9B6tTOj6N
Facebook also ordered the Bee to edit its article, which described Hawaii Senator Hirono subjecting Supreme Court nominee Barrett to the deliberately nonsensical “witch test” from the classic comedy film ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’, and “not [to] speak publicly about internal content reviews,” Dillon continued, concluding with a cheeky “Oops, did I just tweet this?”
A Black Lives Matter leader said that if change doesn’t happen, they’ll “burn down this system.” That’s allowed on Facebook. You can quote it. You can link to it. But a Monty Python joke about burning a witch at the stake? That’s incitement to violence. ? show.
“In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement to violence?” the CEO tweeted, contrasting Facebook’s actions with the tolerance shown toward Black Lives Matter protesters who threatened to burn down “this system.”
Hirono, in the article, delivers the whole Monty Python monologue, which concludes that “logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.” But the article ends well for would-be Justice Barrett, as Senate Majority Leader “Mitch McConnell entered the room and put a stop to the proceedings” before the nominee could be weighed against the duck using “the bathroom scale from Jerry Nadler’s office.”
While the lines would be familiar to anyone who’s seen the film, or anyone who’s ever spent time with anyone who’s seen the film, Facebook’s reviewers apparently fell into neither category. Their missing sense of humor stuck in the craw of many social media users, however, including Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), who has become one of the most vocal critics of Big Tech censorship in Washington.
.@Facebook now censoring the @TheBabylonBee and effectively kicking them off the Facebook network. For making a joke that called out Dems’ religious bigotry against #AmyConeyBarrett. The fix is in https://t.co/gqJKyJhGpv
Serious Christian persecution coming from Facebook. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Wikipedia..the list goes on concerning the Tech companies that have embraced evil.
Others commiserated by sharing the unremarkable circumstances that had led to their own banning…
i was suspended for saying that Elizabeth Warren should take a long walk off a short pier. they said it “incites self harm”. I’m not joking either, it happened.
Facebook demonetized my entire page for posting a video showing Kyle Rittenhouse helping an injured protester in Kenosha and noting that he didn’t show up there with any malicious intent. And gave me a community guidelines violation & are threatening to completely delete my page
…or suggesting the only logical response.
pic.twitter.com/R9xl82PuBW
We will not be editing the article to get our page’s monetization reinstated. We will, however, be talking to the media about this. Send your inquiries my way: seth@babylonbee.com
Dillon, for his part, vowed he would not be editing the article.
The conservative-leaning Bee’s humour has often gone unappreciated by the Big Tech platforms that host it. Twitter suspended its account entirely in August amid what many insisted was a targeted purge of accounts satirizing the “woke” Left, before reinstating it hours later amid public outcry. Meanwhile, liberal fact-checker Snopes has repeatedly targeted the Bee with its disinformation warnings, arguing this is necessary because – according to a less-than-scientific “study” conducted last year – a hefty minority of Republicans believe its articles are real.
Unscientific as that study may have been, the Bee’s articles have fooled such influential figures as President Donald Trump, who retweeted a headline claiming “Twitter shuts down entire network to slow spread of negative Biden news” last week – though admittedly this was during a period in which Twitter was blocking all attempts to tweet a New York Post story unfavorable to the Democratic candidate.
92 percent of political contributions made by Facebook employees over the 2020 campaign period have gone to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org. Some 99 percent of donations from Twitter employees had gone to the same party.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google have fervently denied earlier accusations of bias against conservatives despite evidence to the contrary – including multiple whistleblower reports, hidden camera videos, as well as internal company documents. Some media influencers even insist Facebook is actually slanted in favor of them.
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