Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, announced this week his company will spend $250,000 in advertising on X, formerly Twitter. That advertising budget is intended to offset lost advertising revenue from major companies spooked by accusations Musk is allowing antisemitism, and even pro-Nazi propaganda, to run amuck on the social media site.
The accusation can be traced back to Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group, that says it found Nazi-related content on X that allegedly ran alongside ads from Fortune 500 companies. With some of those X posts in hand, the liberal organization then not-so-subtly asked Apple, IBM, Disney, and Comcast if they really wanted to keep their advertising dollars on X.
The pressure campaign worked as intended and now Musk has filed a lawsuit against Media Matters and its reporter over the accusation.
“Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” the lawsuit states.
In an interview with AFN, Dillon says the public might think it sounds like a Babylon Bee headline for the Bee to pledge money to the world’s richest man, but that is not what is happening here.
“I'm not giving money to him. I'm trying to keep this platform alive,” Dillon says.
Musk, whose estimated net worth is an astonishing $241 billion, is the name behind Tesla and the dreamer behind SpaceX, who famously plans to colonize Mars. Voicing a new passion, this time for First Amendment-protected speech, Musk bought a majority stake in Twitter and joined its board of directors in April 2022.
Just one month earlier, in March, Twitter’s unhappy Humor Nazis has locked The Babylon Bee’s account. Its wrongthink crime was a story that “awarded” a “Man of the Year” award to Rachel Levine, the transgender Health and Human Services official. Levine (pictured below) is, in fact, a man with long hair who wears dresses.
“The Left isn't interested in freedom or debate,” Dillon warned on his personal Twitter account after the suspension. “They demand ideological conformity. Submit or they'll silence you.”
The suspension and Dillion’s accusation got noticed by Musk, who contacted the Bee over its suspension and was seated in the board room just weeks later.
Musk then finalized a purchase of Twitter, for $44 billion, in October of last year. Within a matter of weeks, Musk disclosed the social media company had punished users and suppressed free speech in cooperation with the highest levels of the federal government.
Nobody on the Right was surprised to learn of Big Brother-like censorship by the FBI and Homeland Security, but Democrats in Congress brazenly praised Twitter and the Feds for secretly working together to censor unwanted views, which is fascism.
Those revelations about "shadow banning" and "visibility filters" were named the “Twitter Files," which came out in several stories written by independent journalists.
Dillon tells AFN the enemies of Musk are enemies of the First Amendment and free speech.
“They want to destroy [Musk] as a result of that,” Dillon says, “because he threatens everything that they hold dear: their power and control over the narrative, and what everybody thinks and is allowed to say.”
