Twitter has doubled down on its suspension of the account belonging to the satirical website The Babylon Bee by suspending the personal account of its chief editor after he ‘joked’ about what it would take to lift the suspension.
The Babylon Bee’s editor-in-chief Kyle Mann is in ‘twitter jail’, locked out of his account for suggesting that Twitter might lift its original suspension “if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp.”
The comment was likely a reference to Twitter allowing Communist Chinese Party PR people and apologists to operate freely on the platform.
The tweet landed Mann a personal suspension for ‘hateful conduct’, as noted by Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon:
The Babylon Bee's editor in chief has now been locked out of Twitter for hateful conduct. pic.twitter.com/toNL98w2mb
As we covered yesterday, Seth Dillon appeared on on Tucker Carlson’s show Monday to speak about the original suspension of the Babylon Bee by Twitter for for promoting a parody article about transgender Biden Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine being the “man of the year.”
The accounts of the Bee and its editor are eligible to be restored after a 12 hour suspension, but only once the original tweets have been deleted, an action that Dillon says will not be forthcoming.
We're not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.
“It’s like asking us to say 2+2=5,” Dillon told Carlson, adding “We’re sitting here looking at this email that tells us in order to reinstate our account and get access to be able to tweet again, we’ve got to delete this tweet. And the tweet’s a joke, that’s the first thing to get straight here. This is satire…”
“We don’t believe that facts are hate speech, that speaking truth is hate speech,” the CEO said, adding “At some point, people need to stick by this, Tucker.
“They’re asking us to basically bend the knee and say ‘we admit that this is hateful conduct, please keep us on your platform.’ And we’re not going to do that, so we don’t know where this ends,” he further urged.
Watch:
Carlson himself tweeted that both the posts of the Bee and Mann are “true” with screenshots of them, prompting Twitter to censor the post. In its place now appears the note “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules.”
The platform has likely stopped short of suspending Carlson knowing that it would garner massive media attention.
Rand Paul: Elon Musk Will Go Down As A Historic Champion For Free Speech
“Somewhere along the way something happened and people began to think that only certain forms of speech were acceptable.”
Published
3 weeks ago
on
18 May, 2023
Steve Watson
Screenshot
Senator Rand Paul praised Elon Musk Wednesday for standing up for free speech, predicting that the Twitter owner will be recorded as a key figure in history in the fight against censorship.
Referring to Musk’s compelling take down of a CNBC hack earlier this week, Paul noted “Thank God for someone who can still speak their mind and won’t take some guff off a journalist who tells him he can’t speak his mind.”
“Somewhere along the way something happened and people began to think that only certain forms of speech were acceptable,” The Senator urged.
“Then along came Elon Musk,” Paul continued, adding “The country, the Bill of Rights frankly, all of us, are going to be very thankful that a guy with a lot of money bought a social media entity and allowed us to see the government colluding to limit speech.”
“People need to get this right. Private companies can decide what they want to air, newspapers can, television shows can. But what we cannot allow to happen is the government to collude with private business and use them basically as their extension and their arm of censor,” Paul emphasised.
He added that “Elon Musk exposed this only because he had 44 billion dollars to buy a company and expose their inner workings off collusion with government.”
Watch:
Rand Paul:
"Then along came Elon Musk. The country, the Bill of Rights frankly, all of us, are going to be very thankful that a guy with a lot of money bought a social media entity and allowed us to see the government colluding to limit speech."pic.twitter.com/8DFeUtTqAL
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 18, 2023