Satirical news outlet Babylon Bee is yet another target of woke corporate cancel culture on the tech front. But the company’s choosing its battles, sitting out litigation against its former email provider while also planning to fight back by suing Twitter.
For nearly two years, Babylon Bee used Front, a specialized email and social media messaging platform, but recently Front yanked Babylon Bee off its product without warning less than two months after the Babylon Bee started also managing messages for Libs of TikTok.
Babylon Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon told The Daily Wire last Friday he believes that its comedic political messages rubbed its service provider the wrong way. The Babylon Bee does not shy away from ribbing President Joe Biden, his administration, and the Left.
Dillon said several weeks ago Babylon Bee received an unexpected email from Front informing them that they had terminated their account, effective immediately. Sure enough, moments later, they were unable to send or receive email.
For weeks afterwards, Dillon says his team scrambled because the Bee is a company spread across multiple cities, so email is essential to their operation.
Dillon said Front “is run by a group of woke, left-wing tech elitists. Just like Twitter, Facebook, The New York Times, Snopes, and the many other companies that have attacked us, they simply can’t abide by satire that dares to mock their left-wing orthodoxy.”
However, Dillon said to his knowledge Front had not prima facie violated the terms of service. And while he said there’s a good chance if Babylon Bee brought litigation against Front during the discovery phase they might find evidence of anti-Christian bias, but for them it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Instead, Dillon said the Bee plans to launch litigation against Twitter for locking the Bee out of its Twitter account for the past few months after satirically honoring transgender Biden appointee Dr. Rachel Levine as its “Man of the Year.” The Bee’s staff has said the mock award was meant to poke the media for these types of honorifics, not to go after Levine.
“We are planning to take on Twitter head on, with both The Bee and Libs of TikTok in the near future, for their treatment of us,” Dillon said in an interview. “They are violating their terms, and there are laws that now protect against viewpoint discrimination, most notably the House bill 20 that was passed in Texas, and allows anyone who does business in Texas to file suit under that law.”
Dillon noted that law has been upheld and ruled constitutional by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, so they may be suing “Twitter in the very near future.”
“We reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated in its Sept. 16 decision upholding this Texas anticensorship law.
It’s no secret that leftist companies like Front and Twitter are led and run by progressives who use their positions to advance a hard-left agenda. A 2017 Stanford Graduate School of Business survey of more than 600 technology leaders and founders revealed just how liberal these types are, with 80 percent of tech millionaires overwhelmingly donating to Democrats over Republicans. These tech executives also support raising taxes on the wealthy and federal programs to redistribute wealth.
While they claim they oppose authoritarianism, they are blind to their own authoritarianism through suppression of speech and different viewpoints. Finally, the Bee plans to sting back.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.