Secret Censors: Babylon Bee CEO Thinks Facebook Is Moving Beyond News to Suppress Wrong Kind Of Comedy
One of the most popular “stories” on The Babylon Bee right now bears the headline, “Scandal As Newsom Campaign Produces Old Yearbook Photo Showing Larry Elder In Blackface.”
The faux article goes on to claim, “Newsom will be spending $12 million in predominately black areas of Southern California to remind black voters that Elder is a fake black person—and that pasty white millionaire, winery owner, and French cuisine connoisseur Gavin Newsom is a better choice for the black community than Larry Elder.”
What kind of “news quality score” would an obvious joke like this warrant? What kind would any joke warrant? These are the questions preoccupying Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who believes Facebook is applying journalism standards to his company’s satirical stories.
Dillon tells The Daily Wire that the Bee began to see a precipitous drop in traffic immediately following the presidential election. To some extent, that was to be expected, given that audiences were less likely to engage with politically-themed humor once the winner had been settled. But the decline continued at a steady pace in the following months. In the past, more than 80% of the Bee’s traffic came from Facebook. Today, that number is down to just 30%.
Dillon couldn’t make any sense of it unless the platform was intentionally throttling the reach of his company’s content. Yet there’s only one reason Facebook has publicly offered for manipulating user feeds in that manner, and that is to “reduce the spread” of low-quality reporting.
Stymied, Dillon asked the tech giant about his suspicions that it has been using these new journalism algorithms as a weapon against the Bee’s popularity.
He says he never got a straight answer.
Pay No Attention To The Men Behind The Curtain
When Donald Trump is kicked off Twitter, the public, at least the part of the public that’s interested, knows about it. When Facebook decides to brand a post “misinformation,” the label is there for the world to see. But what about the algorithms and censors, working silently in the background to stifle so-called “lower-quality” reporting? How can you question or protest speech suppression that you never see?
Conservative legal experts have been busy in the pages of Time and The Wall Street Journal debating how the First Amendment should apply to social media. Some say these platforms are private companies that should have the power to expel political leaders and remove posts from nonconformist medical experts as they see fit. Others claim they should be viewed as public utilities who, like railroads, are compelled to carry all comers, regardless of political affiliation.
As the Bee’s predicament shows, both sides might be arguing from an increasingly irrelevant paradigm — the more important question might be what obligations the tech giants have to divulge how and to whom they’re applying their stealth quality standards.
What responsibility do the purveyors of public speech have to disclose their secret machinations to users? What if you’ve been kicked off the train without even knowing it?
A Joke By Any Other Name
As has been reported in The New York Times, Facebook’s efforts to artificially weight some news outlets over others went into hyperdrive after staffers lobbied for changes to address the popularity of conservative and rightwing publications.
Immediately following the November election, a group of employees went to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, upset over “election-related misinformation.” Zuckerberg responded by instituting what his head of global affairs called emergency “break glass” measures. One of those measures was creating a secret internal ranking system that would boost stories from establishment outlets by giving them a high “news ecosystem quality” (NEQ) score while suppressing others by giving them low scores.
The problem with the rankings is that no one outside Facebook knows precisely how they’re assessed or by whom. As several anonymous sources told The Times, the new algorithm “resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages … became less visible.”
But even with conservative complaints that Facebook has been weighting left-wing establishment media over equally (if not more) reliable conservative publications, these measures were ostensibly designed to apply only to news. What of jokes about news? Why would the kind of comedy that has been a staple of late-night television and sketch shows for decades be subject to the same oversight?
Dillon says he asked the platform directly if it was giving his satire site a poor news quality score and suppressing Bee stories on that basis. Months later, Facebook answered. Sort of.
“Unfortunately,” a spokeswoman told Dillon, “when it comes to the news quality score, we are unable to disclose who is/isn’t included as this is an internal metric.”
Dillon points out that it was a strange answer to a straightforward question, especially given the impossibility of assigning a reliability rating to satire.
“There are no factual claims being made on our website,” he points out. “They have internal confidential information that they won’t disclose about how the news quality system works. And so what they were able to tell me was that they won’t say whether we even have a rating.” (The Daily Wire reached out to Facebook to confirm whether or not it has assigned The Babylon Bee an NEQ score and did not receive an answer).
When Dillon pressed further, the Facebook rep did tell him that the platform broadly defines news as “anything that can be perceived as news or influences the news ecosystem.”
By that measure, it would be hard to imagine anyone or anything that wouldn’t rate an NEQ score, as any comment or post that gets shared widely has the potential to “influence” the news ecosystem.
“I mean, guess what,” says Dillon, “we’re one of the most popular entertainment sites on the internet. So of course, stuff that we share is going to have an impact and get written about in the news all the time. Based on her definition, it’s certainly possible that our satire is being caught up in that.”
‘We Have A Right To Be Here’
Dillon stresses that he’s not blaming all the traffic drop on censorship or underhanded tactics behind the scenes. But he thinks platforms should have to disclose how they’re applying standards so that businesses that rely on social media have some clarity on whether they are being targeted unfairly, so that, if necessary, they can address it.
Dillon says people ask him all the time why The Babylon Bee still bothers to stay on Facebook and Twitter instead of leaving these sites. His argument for staying is that social media is where speech happens. It’s where debate and public discourse take place.
“These three or four platforms essentially function as the modern public square,” Dillon contends. His company specializes in a specific brand of political speech—satire that sharply presents a point of view through exaggeration and mockery. This type of discourse has a long and important role to play in the social and cultural debate going back to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” in the 18th century that the starving Irish could just sell their children as food to the land-owning British.
In the argument for American independence, no one used mockery more effectively than Benjamin Franklin, whose tongue-in-cheek “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” crystallized the colonists’ complaints against English oppression.
Or as the liberal journalist Molly Ivins once put it, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.”
The Bee has been uniquely effective at bringing conservative ideas to the public square in an age when the left holds the power over all the major levers of cultural influence. For that reason, Dillon says he refuses to be sidelined by removing the Bee from these platforms.
“We’re going to stay there for as long as we can,” he insists. “If we get banned, we get banned. But ultimately, I think we have a right to be there.”
Dillon believes that eventually Constitutional safeguards for free speech will result in measures to prevent the kind of uneven censorship and viewpoint discrimination the tech giants have been employing.
“But a lot of that is out of our hands,” he says. “We’re just going to continue to make noise when we have to appeal directly to our readers — if they enjoy our content, if they want to keep seeing our content, to support us, so that we have a platform whether Facebook likes it or not.”
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