Twitter’s purge continues against current and former Babylon Bee staff who shared the Christian satire site’s graphic dubbing Rachel Levine “Man of the Year,” but it’s not consistently hiding tweets from flagged accounts.
Bee founder Adam Ford, who now runs its hard-news sibling Not the Bee, got locked out of his account for the “hateful” tweet, which shared the Levine graphic with the message “Don’t retweet this or you’ll be suspended from Twitter.”
He was referring to the Bee’s lockout for posting the graphic on Levine, which riffed on USA Today putting America’s highest-ranking transgender federal official on its “Women of the Year” list. Twitter next locked out Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of the Bee, for joking that the site could get reinstated if it threw “a few thousands Uighurs in a concentration camp.” (Official Chinese government accounts remain untouched by Twitter.)
Bee CEO Seth Dillon told Just the News that Ford hadn’t deleted the tweet and would not do so, the same stance taken by the Bee.
Twitter also removed TV host Tucker Carlson’s tweet with screenshots of its “hateful conduct” notices to the Bee and conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, who noted Levine lived 54 years “as a man” before identifying as transgender.
Twitter told Just the News all the locked-out accounts violated its policy that prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
To get back in, they must “delete any violative Tweets and spend 12 hours in read-only mode,” spokesperson Trenton Kennedy wrote in an email.
Even though Twitter’s notices tell the accounts to delete the offending tweets to restore their access, it has unilaterally hid all but the original Bee tweet referring to Levine as “Man of the Year.” The other feeds show Twitter notices where the tweets once appeared: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules.”
Asked to explain why the original tweet was still visible, Kennedy told Just the News it was waiting to hear back from the Bee for the “context” of the tweet “to ensure that we have the information needed prior to taking any enforcement action.”
Twitter left up a tweet it deemed hateful by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that called Levine “a man.” The company only grants this exception for tweets from elected and government officials “given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements.
Rachel Levine is a man. pic.twitter.com/OWgpKUmfHz
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) March 17, 2022
