The editor-in-chief of Christian satire website Babylon Bee accused Facebook of suppressing one of its stories Friday afternoon — an article joking about the viral “Let’s Go Brandon” chant, a now-infamous moment in which NBC Sports’ Kelli Stavast tried to claim a NASCAR crowd shouting “F*ck Joe Biden” was saying something less damaging to the President.
Kyle Mann (pictured, left) shared two screenshots to Twitter — one of Babylon Bee’s Facebook post for the article “Joe Biden Invites Brandon To The White House To Congratulate Him For His Success” and another showing analytics indicating the post received zero impressions, reach, and engagement after several minutes.
Roughly ten minutes later, Mann said he attempted to play around with the privacy setting by attempting to link it to other people, but “no dice.” He claimed the story finally received engagement after he re-shared the link on a second post.
“Facebook is garbage, man,” he remarked of the Big Tech giant.
This is not the first time Babylon Bee or members of its staff have faced suppression issues or censorship.
Left-wing “fact checker” Snopes has repeatedly targeted Babylon Bee for satire stories, particularly ones that mock CNN and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“The Babylon Bee has managed to fool readers with its brand of satire in the past,” Snopes has ominously warned.
In 2020, Facebook demonetized the Bee’s page in response to a story teasing Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) with a joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail — even after an appeal and manual review, saying the article “incites violence.”
In 2019, Instagram removed a cartoon shared by Babylon Bee founder Adam Ford for “hate speech.” As previously reported by PJ Media, the cartoon comparing “the moral outrage of abortion to the moral outrage of slavery” was removed from app for allegedly breaching the Facebook-owned platform’s “Community Guidelines on hate speech or symbols.”
“This is the third time a Facebook property has tried to silence me without any justification,” Ford told PJ Media at the time. “The first was for a comic defending traditional marriage, and the second was when I was running The Babylon Bee and they tried to label it as ‘fake news.’ It just keeps happening. And it only seems to happen to conservatives.”
During a July interview with Breitbart News, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon warned self-censorship — both online and offline — to evade left-wing criticisms and blacklisting is “doing the tyrant’s work for him.”
“There has to also be this uprising from people in their places of work,” Dillon said. “Young professionals, students on their campuses, rather than … doing the tyrant’s work for him by censoring themselves, they have to be bold and speak the truth, push back on this nonsense and really assert their right to be in the workplace and to have the thoughts and views and conservative values that they have.”
He continued, “If they don’t do that en masse, then they’re going to continue to feel this pressure to be silent and to keep their views to themselves, and as long as they do that, the left is gonna continue to pummel us in the culture battle. I really think it’s about boldness and speaking up.”
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