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July 29, 2022

                                                            The Babylon Bee: Fake News You Can Trust.

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                                                                                    -The Babylon Bee’s Self-Description

The satirical site, the Babylon Bee (the Bee) has been fact-checked, criticized and and/or censored by Facebook, Twitter, Mailchimp, Snopes, Politifact, the New York Times and Slate on numerous occasions. This is literally incomprehensible since the Bee explicitly represents itself as a satirical “fake news” site.  One cannot “fact-check” a joke.   Why then do so many “liberal” sites insist on fact-checking explicit non-factual satire?

One might think the answer is simple:  Liberals, like everyone else, just don’t like to be made the butt of humor.  However, this cannot be the whole story.  First, conservatives may not like it either, but do not tend to react in the same unhinged way to humor. 

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Second, liberals do not merely dislike satire.  As the liberal reaction shows, they are so distressed that they cannot even recognize satire as satire. The liberal overreaction is not therefore just that they, like everybody else, do not like being criticized.  There is something deeper, and quite illuminating, going on here.

In March 2018, The Bee published an article suggesting that CNN uses an industrial-sized washing machine to “spin” the news.  Snopes fact-checked the article and rated it “false.”  Facebook cited the Snopes’ fact-check in a warning message to The Bee and threatened to limit their content distribution and monetization.  Adam Ford, who created the Bee, tweeted a screenshot of Facebook’s warning message to his followers, exposing Facebook’s overreaction.  Facebook apologized and admitted that “there’s a difference between false news and satire. This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It’s … won’t count against the domain in any way”.  Snopes also admitted that “it should have been obvious that the Bee piece was just a spoof.”

In July 2019, The Bee published an article referring to an actual event titled “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure’,” which Snopes rated “false.” Snopes also suggested that the article was deliberately deceptive, rather than genuinely satirical. However, the Bee was clearly satirizing those kinds of cases in which someone, like Jussie Smollett, attempts to generate a fake case of discrimination.  The Bee released a statement that the Snopes fact-check was a “smear” that is “both dishonest and disconcerting” and announced that a law firm had been retained to represent The Bee because “Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and de-platform us.” 

Snopes, attempting to save face, responded claiming readers were “confused” by its original article. That is, it’s your fault.  

In the same place, Snopes revised the wording of the fact-check and added an editor’s note clarifying that they had not meant to imply “deceptive intent” to the Bee article.  

In October 2020, The Bee posted a story on Facebook with a link to a story about the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court titled “Senator Hirono Demands ACB be Weighed Against a Duck to See If She Is a Witch.”  This is a reference to a bizarre Medieval-style test to determine if someone is a witch from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail