Twitter mistakenly suspended the account of The Babylon Bee, a satire website, on Monday.
The satire site’s account was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules against “platform manipulation and spam,” according to a message posted by Babylon Bee Editor-In-Chief Kyle Mann. A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Wire that the suspension was a mistake.
“This account was mistakenly caught in a spam filter. This has been reversed and the account has been reinstated,” the spokesperson said.
WELP pic.twitter.com/8rvCWmy6hx
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) August 17, 2020
The Babylon Bee has a history of being targeted by journalists, platforms, and even fact-checking websites for its satire. In January, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan complained about the Bee’s wide reach on social media and claimed that “a lot of people sharing this ‘satirical’ story on Facebook don’t know it is satire,” referring to a January 3 satire piece titled “Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani.”
“A CNN reporter is taking shots at the Bee because our articles get shared a lot and some people think they’re real (which will always happen with satire),” Babylon Bee founder Adam Ford said in response to O’Sullivan’s complaint. “After thinking ‘how adorable,’ I thought, ‘well surely this guy has chirped at the Onion for the same thing…’”
“There are websites dedicated to chronicling reactions from people who think Onion stories are real. Foreign leaders have famously been fooled by Onion articles. And this guy’s bio says he ‘covers disinformation’ for CNN. Surely he has taken the Onion to task as well, yes?” Ford added, before posting screenshots of over a dozen instances when O’Sullivan shared satire stories from The Onion.
Last year, The Babylon Bee threatened legal action against the fact-check site Snopes over a “defamatory” fact-check of fake political stories that Snopes claimed were meant to “deliberately mislead readers.”
In response to threatened legal action by The Babylon Bee, Snopes created a new category for their fact-checking process called “Labeled Satire.” According to Snopes, the label is meant to reflect that an article labeled satirical does not fit within the definition of satire.
“This rating indicates that a claim is derived from content described by its creator and/or the wider audience as satire,” Snopes says. “Not all content described by its creator or audience as ‘satire’ necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a distinction between ‘real’ satire and content that may not be effectively recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such.”
The Babylon Bee accused Snopes of concocting a vague definition in order to target the satire site directly under the guise of an objective rating system.
“From their view, we’re just pretenders, using the label ‘satire’ to our advantage so we can hoodwink the masses,” the Bee said. “It’s really extraordinary, especially since they’ve acknowledged in private communication with us that there is a ‘clear distinction’ between our satire and intentionally misleading fake news. For some reason, they refuse to acknowledge the clear distinction in their published articles.”