Government

Senator Roger Wicker Threatens Twitter For Cancel Culturing Conservative 'Humor' Site

Bakers don't have to bake gay wedding cakes, but websites have to host offensive content? Cool, got it.

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TweetingOn March 21, the Babylon Bee tweeted out a “joke” about Dr. Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, being the site’s pick for “Man of the Year.” The Bee bills itself as the conservative version of The Onion, and the “joke” was that Dr. Levine, who is transgender, had been named one of twelve “Women of the Year” by USA Today.

Get it?

Twitter locked the account for violating the site’s hateful conduct policy and will not restore it until twelve hours after the tweet has been deleted, depriving users of such har-har-hilarious posts as “Are You A Groomer? 9 Things To Look For,” “Oh No! Noah Accidentally Fills Ark With Only Male Animals Because He’s Not A Biologist,” “Exciting! Check Out These 9 Trans-Friendly Kids’ Shows Coming To Disney.”

The Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon remains defiant, tweeting, “We’re not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

But where Dillon claims to be telling the “truth” when he misgenders a public official, Senator Roger Wicker defends the Bee as “a satirical website” which “intentionally uses satire to draw attention to public figures, news stories, pop culture, and other issues of the day.” The Mississippi Republican took to Twitter — of course! — to accuse the company of “stifl[ing] a diversity of viewpoints and free discourse on the internet.”

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In point of fact Big Tech companies can continue to “employ their own judgements on their platform members” because that is how the First Amendment goes, as Roger Wicker, University of Mississippi School of Law (’75) knows perfectly well. We don’t have compelled speech in this country, and no site is obligated to host any content at all. And that would still be the case if Wicker got his way and his “reform” to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act got passed.

So users will just have to click on over to the Bee’s site to read cool stories like “Zookeepers Scramble To Vaccinate All Lizards After Hearing Pelosi Got COVID” or “China Introduces New Head Of COVID Policy Dr. Anthon-Yong Fauching.”

Big loss there.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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