Mistaken for factual reporting
As the readership of The Babylon Bee increased from 2016 to 2020, there were independent, ongoing discussions within journalistic circles on how to handle the rise of fake news and its influence on the public.[26][27][28] The Babylon Bee was brought into this wider conversation when several of their articles were shared on social media or reported upon, ostensibly as factual.[26]
In 2019, The Babylon Bee satirically criticized Donald Trump with an article saying that Trump claimed he had "done more for Christianity than Jesus". The article went viral, prompting a fact check from Snopes after some thought the article was a real story.[16]
The Conversation published research by academics at the Ohio State University in August 2019 that found that people regularly mistook satirical reports from The Babylon Bee, The Colbert Report, The Onion, and others for genuine news. They found that "stories published by the Bee were among the most shared factually inaccurate content in almost every survey we conducted." They also found that both Republicans and Democrats mistook articles from The Babylon Bee as news, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so.[29] The Babylon Bee 's editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, criticized the research in a conversation with Reason TV, describing it as "methodologically flawed" and saying The Conversation reworded the headlines and took them out of context when asking survey respondents if they thought they were real.[30] Reason 's John Osterhoudt said that the headlines had been "stripped of both context and comedy", giving as an example The Babylon Bee headline "CNN: 'God Allowed the Mueller Report to Test Our Shakeable Faith in Collusion'" that was rephrased to participants as "CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper said his belief that Trump colluded with Russia is unshakable; it will not change regardless of statements or evidence to the contrary."[30]
Media outlets' responses to incidents in which The Babylon Bee's content was mistaken for factual reporting have varied. Some have described The Babylon Bee and its content as obviously satirical,[31][13] whereas others have suggested the site misleads its readers, either intentionally or inadvertently.[14] The frequency with which Babylon Bee stories are confused with real news has resulted in numerous reactions from fact-checkers.[20]
In September 2020, British newspaper The Guardian reprinted as factual a Bee-doctored image of LeBron James wearing a lace collar supposedly in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.[32]
In October 2020, a satirical news story by The Babylon Bee claiming that Twitter had been shut down to protect Joe Biden from negative coverage was retweeted by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who, according to some journalists, seemed to not realize the article was parody and condemned the fabricated incident described in the story as a case of leftist censorship.[33][34] This event prompted Kevin Roose, writing in The New York Times, to question whether The Babylon Bee "traffic[s] in misinformation under the guise of comedy", concluding that "The Babylon Bee is not a covert disinformation operation disguised as a right-wing satire site, and is in fact trying to do comedy, but may inadvertently be spreading bad information when people take their stories too seriously".[14]
Parker J. Bach wrote in Slate in 2021 that The Babylon Bee "is adept at writing ironically ambiguous material that lets audiences from different sections of the right reinforce their own beliefs... even if The Babylon Bee 's satire itself should not be considered misinformation, its satire draws on and reinforces actual misinformation and conspiracy". Bach also described the website's material as "riffs on riffs, building referential jokes atop the already referential right-wing commentary about the untrustworthiness of the news".[20] James Varney wrote in The Washington Times that "Surprisingly often, a short piece from the Bee seems to become real news. A jesting report in the Bee will be fact-checked and censored, usually briefly, by social media platforms" and that "as a consequence, the satirical website has been fondly christened by its conservative blogging brethren as 'the paper of record.[15]
On several occasions, social media and other platforms have removed content by The Babylon Bee or flagged or suspended its accounts, though some of these actions were later described by the platforms as errors and reversed. Dillon has accused news media, fact-checking outlets, and social media websites of targeting The Babylon Bee in a movement to deplatform conservative or Christian viewpoints, which he has also described as cancel culture.[35][36][37]
In March 2018, after The Babylon Bees article about CNN "spinning" the news in a large washing machine was classified by fact-checking website Snopes as "false", Facebook sent a notification threatening to limit The Babylon Bees content distribution and monetization.[20] Following some controversy, Facebook identified the notification as a mistake and apologized.
The Babylon Bee's Twitter account was briefly suspended in August 2020 after being mistakenly caught in one of the social media company's spam filters.
