Just a few days ago, Christianity Today was pondering: “Will Elon Musk welcome The Babylon Bee back to Twitter?” Now the outlet has its answer.
Elon Musk, the newly minted owner and CEO of Twitter, reinstated The Babylon Bee’s account Friday, months after the faith-based satire account was locked because the handle’s operators refused to delete a tweet that purportedly violated the platform’s terms of service.
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In March, the then-leaders of Twitter accused The Bee of running afoul of the site’s “hateful conduct” rules by jokingly naming U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine — a male who identifies as female — as its “Man of the Year.”
The tweet in question is still up today:
The issue at the time of the suspension was The Bee CEO Seth Dillon’s unwillingness to erase the tweet. Presumably, under Musk’s leadership, that was not a stipulation to reinstate the account.
“We’re not deleting anything,” Dillon said in a statement at the time. “Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”
CBN’s Faithwire has reached out to Dillon for a statement. If he responds, this story will be updated.
As for Musk, he tweeted an updated Twitter policy moments after The Bee’s account was reinstated. The new rule, he wrote, “is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
“Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted [and] demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” he announced via his personal Twitter account. “You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of [the] internet.”
Some users — including the owner of the popular “Libs of TikTok” handle — were quick to push Musk to define the term “hate,” with The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh asking, “Is it still considered ‘negative/hate’ to refer to a biological man as a man?”
At the same time Musk reinstated The Bee, he also restored the accounts belonging to clinical psychologist and famed author Jordan Peterson and controversial comedian Kathy Griffin.
Griffin was suspended in early November for impersonating Musk on Twitter. Peterson, for his part, was removed from Twitter in June, after he tweeted that celebrity Ellen Page — a female who identifies as male and goes by the name “Elliot” — “just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
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