Seth Dillon, CEO of Christian satirical news site The Babylon Bee, recently spoke at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, an annual political conference aimed at students ages 16 to 26 featuring numerous conservative and right-wing speakers.
During his address, Dillon recounted his personal interactions with Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire who recently purchased Twitter, renamed it X, and promised to make it a bastion of free speech.
The Babylon Bee’s Twitter account was suspended in March 2022 following a tweet linking to an article naming Rachel Levine, who identifies as a trans woman and who serves as the United States Assistant Secretary for Health, “Man of the Year.”
The article was a satirical play on the fact that Levine had been named USA Today’s “Woman of the Year.” However, the post was flagged as “hateful content” and The Babylon Bee lost access to Twitter.
The account was not unlocked until Elon Musk acquired the social media platform and significantly loosened its content moderation standards.
“You know, it’s been just over a year now since Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed his bio to ‘Chief Twit,’ and sent me a DM and said, ‘Do you want The Babylon Bee to be restored? There will be no censorship of humor,’” Dillon recounted.
As the crowd cheered, Dillon continued, “We’ve been trying to think of a joke worth $44 billion ever since,” referencing the price Musk paid for Twitter.
“In fact, we interviewed [Musk] several months back and handed him an IOU for $44 billion dollars and told him, ‘That’s as good as cash sir. That’s an IOU,’” Dillon joked.
“But as resourceful and committed to free speech as he is, Musk is still just one man. And Twitter, now X, is just one platform,” Dillon said. “Censorship remains the rule on big tech. X is a welcome but rare exception.”
Providing a recent example, Dillon said, “In fact, just a few weeks ago, I was notified that the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative nonprofit, was permanently suspended by Vimeo for posting a talk I’d given about censorship.”
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“Think of the irony of that for a second—as if they wanted to make my point for me more emphatically than I ever could. They censored my talk about censorship. Why? Hate speech, they said,” Dillon continued. “I was giving a talk about how The Bee had been censored unjustly for hate speech on Twitter and they censored it for hate speech. We’ve reached this point now where you can’t even talk about how they’re censoring you without them censoring you.”
