Is Facebook Killing The Babylon Bee?
The biased platform doesn't want the site's right-leaning satire to spread
The Babylon Bee does the work late night humorists refuse to do.
That goes double for “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central hosts and most mainstream joke tellers. The Christian site goes after the Left, and it does so without resorting to “clapter.”
That mission statement puts it in Facebook’s cross hairs. The Bee occasionally turns that battle into comedy, but it’s no laughing matter from a business perspective.
The biased platform has been attacking the Bee for some time now, from “fact checking satirical stories” to claiming select articles could inspire violence. In between, Team Facebook puts its boot down on the humor site’s neck.
The site explained exactly what that means in a stark letter to its subscriber base.
Despite our growing audience—we have many more followers now than we did a year ago—we’re seeing a drastic, steady decline in reach and engagement. It used to be that 80% of our site’s traffic came from Facebook. Now, it’s down to just 30% [emphasis added]. Babylon Bee articles posted to Facebook used to go viral, generating hundreds of thousands of shares. But that just doesn’t happen anymore. Facebook doesn’t allow it.
The email shared a graph to visually display the changes to its Facebook reach:
The Bee says Facebook has a representative tasked with answering any questions the company has about their social media account. Most solo Facebook users aren’t so fortunate to have a dedicated conduit, of course.
The rep won’t answer if Facebook is limiting the reach of the Bee’s Facebook page, though. That silence speaks volumes.
It’s easy to argue the plight of one satirical news site isn’t important beyond those directly impacted by its success or failure. That’s wrong. If The Bee, a smart, innovative site that recently expanded to include video satire, is snuffed out by Facebook, what chance does other right-leaning humor have?
We’ve already seen comedians getting silenced by Big Tech, from overly political figures like JP Sears to apolitical voices like Ryan Long.
The war on The Bee is no accident. The site is actively targeted by Facebook, news fact checkers, The New York Times and other progressive forces.
For now, The Bee asks those eager to keep the site alive to subscribe to its members only service. That kind of direct support might mean Facebook can’t complete its goal of scrubbing the web of the best satirical news site for Red State USA.