"New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach."

"Musk’s interest in electric cars or Ukraine comes and goes, but the richest man in the world is constantly joking."

"A shameless punchline thief, he doesn’t discriminate between dad jokes or insult humor. On Twitter, he’s Beavis and Butt-Head, chuckling at everything.... His stated reason for buying Twitter is to expand free speech, a cause he took up in part because it suspended the account of a conservative parody site, the Babylon Bee, after a post. Days after taking over Twitter, he tweeted: 'Comedy is legal again.' Then people started making fun of him and you’ll never believe what happened next. Elon Musk, comedy savior, transformed into the joke police.... The reason he’s found himself cast in this public drama as the humorless square, the Comstockian scold, is that while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility.... While he’s not especially good at comedy, Musk is a wonderful comic character: The boss who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. He’s Michael Scott from 'The Office,' whose terrible jokes everyone must if not laugh at, at least put up with.... Musk doesn’t need to own his haters in a tweet. They already work for him for free." 

From "Hey, Elon Musk, Comedy Doesn’t Want to Be Legal/He’s Twitter’s chief jokester, but as his free-speech impulses conflict with his push to label parodies, he shows a misunderstanding of how humor works" by Jason Zinoman, the NYT comedy critic.

Zinoman packs a lot into that column. It was hard to excerpt! As a reader, I felt flattered to be assumed to know what "Comstockian" means. If anyone needs to brush up on the story of Anthony Comstock, here's his Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"Over the last week, Libs of TikTok tweeted and retweeted 14 posts about Boston Children’s Hospital in five days, spreading misinformation and fear mongering..."

"... about the hospital’s gender-affirming care practices. In a statement, the Children’s Hospital told Teen Vogue they have 'been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff.' In one tweet, Libs of TikTok called for the hospital to be shut down and in another, they claimed the hospital was providing hysterectomies to 'young girls' though PolitiFact deemed that claim false. 'To qualify for a gender-affirming hysterectomy at Boston Children's Hospital, patients must be 18 or older and must have a letter from a medical doctor stating they have "persistent, well-documented, gender dysphoria," PolitiFact explained.['] But the viral tweet continues to make rounds online and feed into a growing moral-panic about gender-affirming healthcare stoked by right-wing personalities and politicians.... Social and legal affirmation, according to the [American Academy of Pediatrics], like haircuts and name and pronoun changes, can happen at any age, while treatments like puberty blockers typically start at the onset of puberty and certain affirming surgery, while sometimes performed on teens, typically takes place in adulthood."

Teen Vogue reports.

[CORRECTION: I'm rewriting the post from this point onward, because I mixed up Facebook and Twitter, and what I had was confusing. I'm trying to retain the idea worth discussing while correcting the factual error.]

Here's a tweet from Libs of TikTok about how it was suspended from Facebook, told it was a final decision, but then reactivated. I don't know if that had to do with recent posts relaying video Boston Children's Hospital put out to promote its own program. I don't think it's hate speech to repeat someone else's speech, giving it higher profile and opening it up for debate among a larger and more diverse group.

Repeating speech and sending it out to a bigger, more diverse set of people should be basic freedom of speech on social media. Facebook and Twitter ought to adhere to viewpoint neutrality. They do need to censor direct threats to individuals, but I don't think Libs of TikTok made any threats. It only passed along the hospital's speech, and that speech was so controversial that it made other people generate "a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence." If the reaction of other people counts against the sharer of speech, it would mean that the most outrageous speakers have a privilege not to be shared by anyone who has an audience who might become outraged. An illusion of agreement would be created around the worst ideas.

I see that Libs of TikTok — just 4 hours ago — passed along video labeled "Yale Pediatric Gender Program director says she treats kids as young as THREE on their 'gender journey' including medical intervention." So it seems they are back in action, inviting everyone to absorb the message and think for themselves. There's nothing in the text of the tweet that can be characterized as misinformation (unless you're going to expand that term to include encouraging people to think their own thoughts instead of passively receiving the speech the way the speaker hoped you would receive it).

Is that what was different about the Boston Children's Hospital tweet? Did it contain a factual misstatement about the treatment?

And here's something Libs of TikTok retweeted 10 hours ago — Joe Rogan talking with Seth Dillon (of the Babylon Bee) about the censorship of Libs of TikTok:

Rogan is right that it’s possible to cherry-pick videos to try and misrepresent a group. But you can’t argue that Libs of TikTok has misrepresented anyone when the Left consistently and aggressively defends the behavior she’s highlighted. https://t.co/jeK2E2dica

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 18, 2022

Musk advances, promising significant improvements.

Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022

ALSO:

Musk reached out to us before he polled his followers about Twitter's commitment to free speech. He wanted to confirm that we had, in fact, been suspended. He even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter. Now he's the largest shareholder and has a seat on the board.

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) April 5, 2022

Dillon is CEO of The Babylon Bee.

"Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken down by Facebook were left-leaning... [Facebook] said it made room for satirical content..."

"... but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.... In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used 'satire' claims to protect their presence on the platform.... For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire. 'At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture'....  'Removing someone from social media can end their career these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement'.... 'You just wake up and find you’re in danger of being shut down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic'...." 

From "For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didn’t Recognize Irony/As Facebook has become more active at moderating political speech, it has had trouble dealing with satire" (NYT). 

The headline is misleading as you should be able to tell if you read my excerpt carefully. It won't work for Facebook that has a rule against right-wing satire but allows left-wing satire.

The quote "At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture" is from Emerson T. Brooking, "a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms." He's guessing that Facebook stopped accepting satire as a cover for disinformation and incitement. That worked against The Babylon Bee, as intended. Then, it had to apply the same rule to left-wing satirists. It's not that Facebook "didn't recognize irony." The "trouble dealing with satire" wasn't that it was humor-deaf and couldn't distinguish satire from serious things. It was that satire worked too well as an excuse to justify publishing things Facebook wanted to exclude. 

What kind of left-wing material got swept up in Facebook's censorship? The NYT describes a cartoon by "left-leaning cartoonist" Matt Bors. Titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” it "depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be 'stabby guys' and to 'yell slurs at teenagers' while playing video games." I don't think the Times has a link to it, but I found it easily: here. And you can read more of Bors's cartoons here. I read his newest cartoon, and it begins with a false statement: "Minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for 45 years." But the minimum wage has only been $7.25 since 2009. In 1976, the minimum wage was  $2.30. Yes, but the cartoon is set in the future. Get it?!

2 questions of balance: 1. Does Amy Coney Barrett weigh as much as a duck, and 2. Is Facebook applying its anti-violence policy equally to conservatives and liberals?

Regular readers know I'm not a fan of the Babylon Bee website. I don't think it's original or sophisticated enough, but I very much want the big social media platforms to apply their various content-related policies with neutrality as to viewpoint. They ought to test any censorship of the right by asking whether if the equivalent material were presented by the left, they'd do the same thing. 

I'm reading a Fox News article about Facebook's decision to censor a Babylon Bee piece titled "Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch." The fictional quote from Hirono is: "Oh, she's a witch alright, just look at her! Just look at the way she's dressed and how she's so much prettier and smarter than us! She's in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!" And: "In addition to being a Senator, I am also quite wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows witches burn because they are made of wood. I think I read that somewhere. Wood floats, and so do ducks-- so logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.'" 

The threat of burning and the verbal image of burning a human being — a specific, famous person — is violent. It's certainly not a true threat, because witch burning is a familiar trope in American discourse and because, if somehow we're confused about whether literal witch burning is a possibility, we can be confident that Barrett weighs significantly more than a duck.

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweets: "So after a manual review, Facebook says they stand by their decision to pull down this article and demonetize our page... They say this article 'incites violence.' It's literally a regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie! In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement to violence? 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?" 

I'm not impressed by the "regurgitated Monty Python" argument. Not everyone knows the movie. I saw it long ago but didn't remember this part, which actually isn't a good reference point if the aim is to make Hirono look stupid and wrong. Watch:

There, you see that the character who proposes the duck-weight test is attempting to devise a method of convincing the mob that the woman is not a witch. So the Bee lacks originality — cutting and pasting text from a movie script — and it isn't even very good at selecting what text to use.

But Facebook doesn't have a policy against unoriginality, inapt quoting, and lame humor. Facebook teems with that stuff. The question is whether equivalent violent language — with reference to a real person — is censored the same way when it is posted by non-conservatives. I don't know the answer, but if Dillon wants to make an argument that works on me, he needs to point to similar things from the other side that Facebook has not targeted.

"They'll rue the day they made fun of these bad boys. Woe to those who make fun of the cargo shorts and then suddenly need some snacks, a multitool, a first-aid kit, or a Johnny Cash CD. Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more."

Said Brent Barden, quoted in "Family Gonna Be Sorry When They Want Some Trail Mix From Dad's Cargo Shorts They Just Made Fun Of" (in The Babylon Bee, which apparently has heard of my disparagement of it and decided to try to appeal to me by using my well-known "men in shorts" issue).

ADDED: "Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more." Care to rewrite that, Babylon Bee? It's a father, humorously addressing children, and you've unwittingly got him sort of threatening them with his genitalia! And that's right after he's talking about them getting into his pants to find something to eat. So ham-handed!

OH? You've got ham hands? Can I have a ham-hand sandwich, Dad?

HEY: A guy once did make a ham-hand sandwich of sorts...



WELL: That video sure made me laugh a lot. I'm ready to watch all videos by I Did a Thing. You know, there's no arguing with taste, especially in humor... and in bread gloves.

ALSO: "Mad respect for a man willing to strap a laundry basket to his back, put flippers on his hands, and get in a bathtub just to reenact a sea turtle getting a straw stuck in his nose and then slowly dying."

"Top 5 most-believed satirical claims by The Babylon Bee.../Top 5 most-believed satirical claims by The Onion..."

2 interesting lists at The Conversation, reprinted at Snopes, in "Study: Too Many People Think Satirical News Is Real/In a news cycle full of clownish characters and outrageous rhetoric, it’s no wonder satire isn’t fully registering with a lot of readers."

Both lists break down the poll numbers by Republican and Democrat, with Republicans more likely to incorrectly believe Babylon Bee satirical nonfacts and Democrats more likely to believe Onion satirical nonfacts.

Our study on misinformation and social media lasted six months. Every two weeks, we identified 10 of the most shared fake political stories on social media, which included satirical stories. Others were fake news reports meant to deliberately mislead readers.

We then asked a representative group of over 800 Americans to tell us if they believed claims based on those trending stories. By the end of the study, we had measured respondents’ beliefs about 120 widely shared falsehoods....

The most-believed satirical headline from The Babylon Bee was "Most Americans believe that major media companies should apologize for pushing the now-debunked news story of collusion between President Trump and Russia." Second: "Representative Ilhan Omar said that being Jewish is an inherently hostile act, especially among those living in Israel." Those are made-up stories, intended as political humor.

From The Onion, the most-believed story was: "Following the passage of Alabama’s new restrictive abortion bill, a 12-year-old victim of sexual abuse said during an interview that she doesn’t think she can be a mom on top of her already hectic life." Second: "National Security Advisor John Bolton said that an attack on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is 'an attack on all Americans.'"

A couple weeks ago, some people were attacking Snopes for seeming to be fact-checking articles that were made-up as satire. Please remember that I defended Snopes. I said:

It doesn't sound as though Snopes is confused about The Babylon Bee and thinks it's purporting to be a real news site. But even when you completely understand the format is satire, like The Onion, you believe that the satire relates to something real. You have to wonder what is the real thing that happened that this is a satire of. So, for example, in the case of "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?," you'd have to assume, if that's supposed to be funny, Ilhan Omar must have said some anti-Semitic things. The presentation of the quote as satire implies that there is something out there that is being satirized. You extrapolate....

It's not just this inference that something underlies satire, but that headlines get decontextualized in social media....

"Snopes, however, was not content with performing its vital public service of debunking crazy rumors and easing childhood fears."

"It had pretensions to be something more. It took the cultural goodwill built up over years of truth-telling and decided to make a real difference. It kept fact-checking urban legends... but it also began fact-checking politicians and news sites, and conducting its own investigative reports... And that brings me to one of my favorite websites, the Babylon Bee. It’s distinctly conservative, it’s distinctly Christian, it’s very, very funny (especially if you’ve grown up as an Evangelical Christian), and it’s obviously, clearly satire.... Snopes has fact-checked whether Democrats demanded that 'Brett Kavanaugh submit to a DNA test to prove he’s not actually Hitler.' It’s fact-checked whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly 'guessed "free" on TV show "The Price is Right,"' and whether Ilhan Omar actually asked, 'If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?'...  [L]ast week Snopes... fact-checked an article called 'Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said "My Pleasure."'... [I]t questioned whether the article was satire, accusing the Bee of 'fanning the flames of a controversy' and 'muddying the details of a news story.'... [If Snopes] wants to serve its purpose, it must not use its remaining cultural power and its remaining commercial influence to target the satire that stings its allies. Hands off the Babylon Bee."

Writes David French in "Hands Off the Babylon Bee" (National Review).

First, let me disclose my bias. I loathe The Babylon Bee. I don't try to read it. I encounter it because Instapundit puts up the attention-getting headlines so I'm forced to read them and do the half-second-long mental work of seeing that it's just a joke and I never find the joke funny. It's always, oh, no... it's The Babylon Bee. It's like Instapundit is Rickrolling me. But David French says "it’s very, very funny." Not to me, it isn't. Admittedly, I did not grow up as an Evangelical Christian, but I don't know why that would make me more open to attaching nasty fake quotes like "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?" to a real name like Ilhan Omar.

It doesn't sound as though Snopes is confused about The Babylon Bee and thinks it's purporting to be a real news site. But even when you completely understand the format is satire, like The Onion, you believe that the satire relates to something real. You have to wonder what is the real thing that happened that this is a satire of. So, for example, in the case of "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?," you'd have to assume, if that's supposed to be funny, Ilhan Omar must have said some anti-Semitic things. The presentation of the quote as satire implies that there is something out there that is being satirized. You extrapolate.

So, in the case of the insist-on-being-Jews quote, Snopes tried to find the factual basis for the satire:

In this case, the website’s intent was to ridicule Omar’s reaction to escalating violence on the Gaza Strip (“The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable,” she tweeted, emphasizing the plight of Palestinians) by attributing barely coherent anti-Semitic quotes to her. Earlier in the year, Omar was accused by members of both parties of using “anti-Semitic tropes” in criticizing Israel’s influence over U.S. politics. She has made no public statements resembling those in the Babylon Bee article, however.

That is an unusual form of fact-checking, but it is real fact-checking. Snopes also fact-checks The Onion in the same way. For example, there's: "Did ICE Hurl a Pregnant Woman Over a Border Wall?/In June 2018, a piece of satire from 'The Onion' became more confusing to social media users":

The Onion is, of course, a satirical web site that was founded in newspaper form in 1988.

Readers’ mistaking The Onion's humorous material for real news is not uncommon on social media, as demonstrated by questions we’ve received from readers about warring cruise ships and a photograph of Cuban people clinging to the wings of Air Force One.

It's not that people believed the photograph that showed a crowd of people on the wings of Air Force One as it flew, but some readers imagined that something happened, that at least some Cubans clung to the wings of the plane while it was still on the ground.

It's not just this inference that something underlies satire, but that headlines get decontextualized in social media. This is what's I've found so irritating encountering The Babylon Bee at Instapundit. And, yes, I know that lately Instapundit includes some note that the quoted headline is satire — sometimes with a reference to Snopes but also with a nudge that it's awfully close to what's true. For example: "Note to Snopes: It’s the Babylon Bee, so this is satire — or is it?"

So, yeah, I'm defending Snopes. I don't see the problem with what it's doing. I'm sure it leans left, but those who are attacking it lean right. Websites have political leanings. Big deal. So what? That's not worth getting excited about. Who's doing anything wrong here? I don't see much of a problem anywhere. The Babylon Bee isn't very good, in my opinion, and I can't avoid it because it's constantly linked on Instapundit, and I'm not going to quit Instapundit, but I completely own that as my problem.

It's the Era of That's Not Funny.

I've been saying it with my tag since November 17, 2017, but here's Drudge, noticing that John Waters has noticed it:



The Waters link goes to a June 28th piece in Vulture, which I blogged on June 28th, here. I've already quoted the relevant stuff. Asked if Trump makes him laugh, Waters said:

Never. But neither do most of the Democrat character candidates running now either. And you could argue it’s not a funny time, which is true.... There are 40 [Democrats] that are going to divide it all up. You know, the gay one I like. I’d vote for any of them, even though it would be really hard for me to vote for Elizabeth Warren who has never once said a funny thing in her entire life....

But what's this other story?! "MAD Magazine to Cease Publication." I click through to the article at comicbook.com and it begins with an update: "Details have emerged regarding the future of MAD magazine following the end of original content later this year." There's a link, and I click through to another comicbook.com piece:

MAD magazine will not be completely closing down, as previously reported -- although most of its new content will cease, and availability for the iconic humor magazine will be reduced... Rather than closing up shop, the plan at present is to continue publishing issues that will feature reprinted classic MAD pieces, wrapped with new covers art....

The venerable humor magazine, which launched in 1952 at EC Comics, relaunched in 2018.... The 2017 reorganization and subsequent 2018 reboot both struggled with finding an identity for MAD in an increasingly satire-saturated world.

So maybe it's not the Era of That's Not Funny. Maybe it's the Era of Too Much Funny.  We're told "MAD struggled to find an elusive niche," and it "doubled down on lampooning the Trump administration." But that didn't work! Too much competition, and you lose all the pro-Trump readers. But you can't do pro-Trump humor. You alienate the anti-Trump readers, and Trump himself does the pro-Trump humor so well that you have to compete with him. By the way, are conservative humor publications ever good? For example, The Babylon Bee? Always bad.