Mailchimp briefly suspended its account with the faith-based satire website The Babylon Bee on Thursday, claiming the outlet was guilty of “violating our standard terms of use and acceptable use policy.”
The email marketing company didn’t specify in its email to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon what specifically the site had done to violate its terms.
In a statement to Faithwire, Dillon said The Babylon Bee’s account with Mailchimp was reinstated early Thursday afternoon. He said the company claimed it was “a mistake.”
“[It’s] funny how those mistakes always go one way,” he said, adding the outlet is looking for “an alternative solution” for its newsletter.
The suspension comes several months after Mailchimp announced it had adopted a new policy warning it might censor content in the future.
In late October of last year, the Atlanta-based platform said it would use its “sole discretion” to determine whether messages are misleading and should be censored, according to The Daily Signal.
The change went into effect Oct. 28.
“Mailchimp does not allow the distribution of content that is, in our sole discretion, materially false, inaccurate, or misleading in a way that could deceive or confuse others about important events, topics, or circumstances,” Mailchimp explained in a customer message at the time.
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The company said it would enforce its policy change by “issuing a warning to, or suspending, or terminating an account.”
This is not the first time the sardonic website has faced censorship or criticism from news outlets or social media and marketing platforms.
CNN, for example, has accused The Babylon Bee of posting “fake news” intended to be misleading.
Last summer, Twitter briefly suspended the account linked to the satire site, accusing the outlet of “violating our rules against platform manipulation.” At the time, Dillon told Faithwire the decision by Twitter came as “a bit of a shock.”
Twitter ultimately reinstated the account, claiming — like Mailchimp — the censorship was “a mistake.”
Then, in October, Facebook demonetized The Babylon Bee’s page after the site published an article satirizing Sen. Mazie Hirono’s (D-Hawaii) questioning of then-Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
The Babylon Bee had run a satirical article with a “Monty Python”-themed joke about Hirono, which Facebook said “incited violence.”
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In the piece, the writer joked that the senator suspected Barrett, who is now a justice on the high court, was “a practitioner of the dark arts” and quipped Hirono believed the Catholic judge was “a witch.”
“In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement of violence?” Dillon asked at the time. “How does context not come into play here? They’re asking us to edit the article and not speak publicly about internal content reviews. Oops, did I just tweet this?”
***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***