Babylon Bee CEO hopeful free speech will flourish after Meta announcement: 'Better late than never'
The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon applauded Meta's announcement that it was dropping its fact-checkers, calling the move a win for free speech that he only wished had come sooner.
"I think it's great that Mark Zuckerberg is following in Elon Musk's lead there," Dillon told Fox News Digital about Meta's move to bring a "community notes" feature to Instagram and Facebook instead.
"It's never too late to do the right thing. But the time for Zuckerberg to take a stand for free speech, in my view, was when the entire internet was de-platforming the sitting president," Dillon continued, referring to social media platforms that banned Trump in 2021.
"Is it better late than never? Sure. But he had an opportunity there and has not so far recognized his role in that mistake," he added.
FLASHBACK: META'S ‘HISTORY OF CENSORSHIP,’ FACT-CHECKING WOES UNDER THE TRUMP, BIDEN ADMINISTRATIONS
Zuckerberg announced last week that sweeping changes would be coming to "restore free expression" on its social media platforms.
"We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said. "More specifically…we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."
Zuckerberg admitted that the third-party fact-checkers, who partnered with Meta after President-elect Trump's election in 2016, had proven to be "too politically biased" and had "destroyed more trust than they created."
The Babylon Bee, a Christian conservative-leaning satire site which publishes humorous fake news stories, often found itself in the crosshairs of these fact-checkers, particularly after making jokes about liberal media outlets or Democratic politicians.
"We said that CNN had purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news before publishing it," Dillon told Fox News Digital about one "silly joke" the Bee published in 2018 that was fact-checked by Snopes.
In another 2019 "report" on the satire site that was flagged, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., went on the gameshow, "The Price is Right," and guessed that everything was free.
No matter how outlandish the story, Dillon said their articles continued to be flagged by these third-party fact-checkers, leading Facebook to threaten that their account could be demonetized or banned.
"And we're like, wait a minute, there's got to be some carve out for satire here, because that's what satire is. It's funny, fake news," Dillon said. "We are literally making up fake stories and then publishing them on social media. That's the business model. And so, if we can't even make jokes that are fake funny stories, then satire is not allowed, comedy is not allowed on these platforms."
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While he initially believed these fact-checkers were just "humorless scolds" who didn't like their jokes, he came to believe that fact-checkers objected to the truth behind their jokes.
"Obviously, the stories that we tell are false. These are fabricated satirical news reports, but they're predicated in something true. The reason they're funny is because there's truth to them, even if the details of the story itself are false. And it's that truth that's threatening, because what it does is it threatens to poke holes in whatever the narrative is, or expose foolishness for what it is or highlight double standards that they don't want to highlight," Dillon said.
"So I think this fact-checking effort was part of the whole censorship apparatus, to shut down dissent, to use euphemisms like misinformation or hate speech, hateful conduct to categorize speech into these little buckets where they can enforce, their policies and deplatform and silence people who are simply saying things that they don't want to be said in a way that they don't want them to be said," he continued.
Over the years, the Bee has fought back against media fact-checkers who've accused the satire site of intentionally spreading misinformation to dupe people.
In 2021, after facing a legal threat, the New York Times issued a correction to a story which initially claimed the Bee "trafficked in misinformation."
Dillon sees Meta's new move as part of a larger cultural push for more free speech and less censorship since Elon Musk took over X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, and reinstated the Babylon Bee, Trump and several other accounts that had been suspended.
"The Twitter Files exposed a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. I think Americans are tired of not just being lied to by the cultural and institutional political power, but also tired of being controlled by them over what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to think, what you're allowed to express. There's been a lot of pushback on that," he continued.
Whether Zuckerberg's motive was purely political or sincere, Dillon doesn't believe it matters as long as the changes result in more voices being heard on Meta's platforms.
"This is how you push back on bad ideas," he said. "We're tired of seeing bad ideas win."
"So, yes, I am optimistic, cautiously optimistic that that trend for more free speech will continue [in 2025]," Dillon said.
Meta did not return a request for comment.