Twitter Restores Satirical Site Babylon Bee After Outrage Over Suspension, Says It Was Mistakenly Flagged as ‘Spam’
Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
Twitter on Monday restored a satirical publication’s Twitter account after briefly suspending it from the platform.
“We’re writing to let you know that we’ve unsuspended your account,” said a message shared on Twitter by Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. The message said Twitter’s system for finding and removing “multiple automated spam accounts in bulk” flagged the publication as “spam by mistake.”
Twitter says sorry, they made a mistake. pic.twitter.com/ZsM3if2vfj
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 17, 2020
We are back. Twitter destroyed our headquarters with a drone strike, but we are being assured it was an honest mistake.
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 17, 2020
The suspension surprised and angered many conservatives on Twitter, and it initially wasn’t clear why the Babylon Bee was suspended or whether one of the website’s stories prompted Twitter’s system to censor its account. Some of the site’s stories on Monday included a headline suggesting presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris had proposed a plan in which “everybody” would receive a “free 10’x10′ room and three meals a day” — an apparent reference to a prison cell — as well as a headline suggesting President Donald Trump had put himself “on all postage stamps, forcing Democrats to push for abolishing” the United States Postal Service.
The four-year-old website’s stories are often fact-checked by websites, including Snopes, in an apparent effort to assist readers who mistake them for real news. The site’s Twitter account had 550,000 followers as of early Monday.
