In an intensely ironic move, Vimeo censored a talk from The Babylon Bee CEO about censorship.
The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend. During his speech, Dillon discussed Big Tech’s ongoing censorship of his satire site and its fight for freedom of speech. After the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) posted Dillon’s speech on Vimeo, the video platform removed it and banned the Freedom Center’s channel because of the video highlighting Dillon, according to DHFC investigative journalist and writer Daniel Greenfield. The DHFC’s channel now brings up an error message on Vimeo.
Greenfield explained on FrontPage Magazine that Dillon was speaking to the DHFC about Twitter canceling The Babylon Bee last year for naming “transgender” Adm. ‘Rachel’ Levine the “Man of the Year.” While Elon Musk restored The Bee’s account after purchasing Twitter (now X), The Bee’s battle against Big Tech censorship continues. After the DHFC uploaded its various talks and panels, including Dillon’s, on Vimeo, the videos were removed.
“A conservative on the internet is always one thought away from being censored,” Greenfield wrote. “And the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been banned many times before.” The Restoration Weekend addressed many controversial topics, including Islamic terrorists, medical authoritarianism and alleged election fraud, but Greenfield declared that Vimeo cited Dillon’s talk as the reason for its censorship. Specifically, Vimeo censored the DHFC for Dillon’s discussion of the previous Twitter censorship, reportedly repeating Twitter’s former accusation of “Hate Speech.”
Greenfield pointed out the leftist hypocrisy in this area. “The same woke culture that holds festivities of bestselling child porn for the hypocritical orgy of its ‘Banned Books Week’ relentlessly censors any dissent and even the existence of its censorship,” he wrote.
Dillon admitted in the censored speech that he and his team had anticipated potential censorship of the satirical title for Levine at the time. “We were going back and forth when we pitched this joke,” Dillon explained, according to FrontPage Magazine. He added that pre-censorship is a real problem. “This by the way is one of the ways that they censor people. They censor you after the fact, but they also censor you before the fact. There’s pre-censorship that happens because people are afraid to make jokes and statements like this knowing they will probably get censored, so they censor themselves.”
This preemptive censorship is a regular issue for The Bee, Dillon said. “My writers come to me all the time saying, ‘I’ve got a really funny joke, but if we publish this, we might get banned.’” And apparently Dillon was right given that he and the DHFC were censored for even discussing such a speech-crushing situation.
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