This past Sunday night, Twitter took it upon themselves to stand up for justice and all that is right and good by locking The Babylon Bee out of their account “for violating [Twitter’s] hateful conduct policy.”
Recall that this was “the violative Tweet” that offended Twitter’s delicate sensibilities:
Well, evidently Twitter wasn’t content to punish just The Babylon Bee’s Twitter account; they’ve also gone after individual Babylon Bee-ers. Like editor-in-chief Kyle Mann, who was recently notified that he, too, had been locked out of his Twitter account for “violating [Twitter’s] rules against hateful conduct.”
So, what sort of hateful conduct was Mann guilty of? Was it as bad as pointing out that Rachel Levine is biologically male? Nope. Turns out it was even worse than that. Mann’s sin was … pointing out that the Chinese government is committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims and running concentration camps:
The Babylon Bee's editor in chief has now been locked out of Twitter for hateful conduct. pic.twitter.com/toNL98w2mb
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) March 22, 2022
The Chinese government is literally running a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Uyghurs, and Twitter doesn’t even have the guts to flag them for misinformation.
Babylon Bee editor-in-chief @The_Kyle_Mann has now been locked out of Twitter for this tweet.
So, literally perpetuating genocide will not get you booted off Twitter, but making jokes criticizing those who do, will. Got it. pic.twitter.com/Kqc1jzzALs
— Adam Ford (@Adam4d) March 22, 2022
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I mean, this kind of snark is probably 80% of tweets.
They're trying to use their gatekeeping power to control speech. https://t.co/7EQyTUlAII
— Matt Cover (@MattCover) March 22, 2022
That’s sure what it looks like.
It also looks like Twitter may just have a personal beef with The Babylon Bee. Is it possible that Kyle Mann’s real “hateful conduct” in Twitter’s eyes was … publicly criticizing Twitter’s screwy censorship policies?
My latest for the NY Post:
"We’ll continue to spread our comedy and tell our jokes that communicate truth to a culture that hates truth on whatever platforms will allow us to, and we’re grateful for those who stand alongside us in this fight."https://t.co/vNx1GEcnTV
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) March 22, 2022
"If we agree to succumb to their ideological madness simply to access a wider audience, we’re giving up our minds, the last holdout against tyranny."
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) March 22, 2022
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – Orwell
"Truth is treason in the empire of lies." – Ron Paul
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) March 22, 2022
In his opinion piece for the New York Post, Mann concludes:
And indeed, it’s control over our minds that Twitter wants. They can’t just delete the offending tweet and let us back in. They want us to go into our account and click the delete button ourselves. We have to bend the knee, kiss the ring, bow to the towering statue of LGBTQ politics when the trumpets play, or we stay on timeout indefinitely. We have to promise to do better, implicitly agree that calling a man a man is hate speech, and then we’ll be allowed the right to speak on Twitter’s platform.
Well, we’re not going to do that. We’re fighting back. We’ll do whatever we have to do to retain our integrity here. As Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If we give that up, if we agree to succumb to their ideological madness simply to access a wider audience, we’re giving up our minds, the last holdout against tyranny. We’ll wait Twitter out, we’ll appeal Twitter’s decision, we’ll spread the message far and wide that we’ve been kicked out for “hate speech” simply for telling a joke Big Tech did not like.
It’s time to take a stand, and that time is now. If we wait any longer, we may no longer have that chance. We’ve been incredibly blessed at The Babylon Bee in that we have a healthy number of paying subscribers who help us keep the lights on, and we’re going to use that to stand firm here and do what’s right. We’ll continue to spread our comedy and tell our jokes that communicate truth to a culture that hates truth on whatever platforms will allow us to, and we’re grateful for those who stand alongside us in this fight.
Someone’s got to take a stand. Who better than The Babylon Bee? They may be about satire and comedy, but they’re dead-serious about freedom of speech.
More power to them.
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