The Babylon Bee has come under fire for its satirical posts on Facebook before, and it appears it’s happening again.
In a recent Facebook post, The Babylon Bee shared a screenshot claiming “Facebook is soft-censoring some of our posts.” The image, which was reportedly displayed when some users attempted to share certain Babylon Bee posts, showed a pop-up prompt asking users to click to confirm that they wanted to share the post before they could continue.
The Babylon Bee followed up its post with a comment that joked about the “Do you want to share this post?” prompt by saying, “Are you sure you want to use the share button for its intended purpose?”
When reached for comment about this situation, CEO of The Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, gave The Media Research Center the following statement:
Facebook needs to let people share what they want to share without interfering in the process with patronizing prompts designed to make them think twice. The share button is there to be clicked and used for sharing; there's no need to question people who use it for its intended purpose. And there's no reason our content should be singled out and soft-blocked with this prompt.
This is not the first time that The Babylon Bee has had issues with censorship on Facebook. In 2019, when it was still partnering with Facebook as an official fact-checker, Snopes labeled a satire piece about CNN using a washing machine to spin the news as “False.” It claimed that “the site has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles.”
Facebook later said that it would no longer fact-check opinion or satire pieces. While The Babylon Bee’s recent posts have not been fact-checked, similar pop-up prompts like the one noted in this instance are often seen on articles that have been fact-checked.
Facebook has not yet responded to a request for comment as to why some users have received the pop-up prompt when attempting to share The Babylon Bee’s recent posts.
