The Babylon Bee

The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on religion, politics, current events, and well-known public figures. It has been referred to in the media as a Christian, evangelical, or conservative version of "The Onion".
History.
"The Babylon Bee" was created by Adam Ford and was launched on March 1, 2016. Shortly after launch, the site made headlines for mocking the "health and wealth" theology of Jan Crouch, founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, on the day of her death.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey battered Houston, Texas, causing widespread flooding. "The Babylon Bee" leveraged the context of the Houston floods to satirically criticize televangelist Joel Osteen with a headline that read: "Joel Osteen Sails Luxury Yacht Through Flooded Houston To Pass Out Copies Of 'Your Best Life Now'." The article went viral, prompting a fact check from Snopes.
In 2018, Ford sold the website to Seth Dillon, whom Ford described as "a successful businessman who uses his resources for Kingdom purposes." In a public announcement published on his personal website, Ford cited several reasons for the sale, including his discomfort with the power wielded by social media companies like Facebook over creators and their perceived anti-conservative and anti-Christian bias. He wrote that "Facebook has the power to kill publishers, and they do, not only based on publishing techniques, but based on "worldview". Just think about that." At the time of the website's sale, Kyle Mann, who had been head writer since September 2016, became editor-in-chief.
"The Conversation" published research 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 "Bee" as news, but Republicans were more likely to do so. Mann criticized the research in a conversation with ReasonTV, 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.
In October 2020, a satirical news story by the "Bee" claiming that Twitter had been shut down to protect Joe Biden from negative coverage was retweeted by President Donald Trump, who condemned the incident described in the story as a case of leftist censorship. This event prompted "The New York Times" to question whether the "Bee" "traffic[s] in misinformation under the guise of comedy." A few days later, Facebook demonetized the "Babylon Bee" for violating its community standards with a post that allegedly incited violence. "Bee" CEO Dillon announced the incident on Twitter, generating media attention. In response, Facebook apologized and reinstated the account. In an op-ed published in "The Wall Street Journal", Mann criticized Facebook for regulating content in a rigid, automatic way that leaves little room for comedy.
"The Babylon Bee" said in October 2020 that the site receives about 8million visitors a month.
Content.
"The Babylon Bee" takes on the tone and format of a traditional news publication. The site began by lampooning a wide range of topics including progressives, Democrats, Republicans, Christians, and Donald Trump. The purpose of the site, according to its founder Adam Ford in 2016, was not just to evoke laughter, but to give cause for self-reflection. "It's important to look at what we're doing, to 'examine ourselves.' Satire acts like an overhead projector, taking something that people usually ignore and projecting it up on the wall for everyone to see. It forces us to look at things we wouldn't normally look at and makes us ask if we're okay with them." E.J. Dickson publishing in "Rolling Stone" wrote in 2020 that the "Bee" "initially started out as something of an equal opportunity offender" in the topics it satirized. In a 2016 "Washington Post" profile of the site and its founder, Bob Smietana observed that "The "Bee" excels at poking fun at the small idiosyncrasies of believers, especially evangelical Protestants." Susan E. Isaacs publishing in "Christianity Today" wrote in May 2018 that the site "lampoon[ed] the faithful across denominations, political affiliations, and age groups."
In the years leading up to 2020, the site grew less critical of Trump and became more anti-left and anti-liberal, though they continued to satirize topics across both parties. Dickson wrote in 2020 that the site's "most popular posts poke fun at perceived liberal ideology and political correctness, and many are explicitly misogynistic or transphobic". Emma Goldberg of "The New York Times" said in 2020 that although Trump was still not off-limits as a target for the "Bee", "their early coverage of Trump, back in 2016, was much more vitriolic than today's. They called him a psychopath, or a megalomaniac. Now they're more bemused by him and the ghoulish ways he's described on the left."
"The Babylon Bee" also published a book satirizing the Christian self-help industry: "How to Be a Perfect Christian: Your Comprehensive Guide to Flawless Spiritual Living". Founder Adam Ford retained ownership of the book when he left the company.
In November 2020, the "Bee" released a self-published collection of their greatest hits: "The Sacred Texts of The Babylon Bee, Volume 1."
Snopes.com controversy.
The satirical news articles presented by "The Babylon Bee" have been fact-checked by Snopes repeatedly, and some of these fact-checks have been controversial. For example, in March 2018, "The Babylon Bee" published an article quipping that CNN was using an industrial-sized washing machine to "spin" the news. Snopes fact-checked the article, rating it "false". Facebook then cited this fact-check in a warning message to "The Babylon Bee", threatening to limit their content distribution and monetization. Ford tweeted a screenshot of the warning message to his followers, drawing public attention to the matter. Facebook quickly apologized, with the statement that "there's a difference between false news and satire. This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It's since been corrected and won't count against the domain in any way."
In July 2019, Erica Thomas, a Georgia State Representative born in the United States, claimed to be told to "go back to where she came from" by a man in a grocery store. It was later found that witnesses did not corroborate her story, and the man in question was a Democrat who claimed he was only upset because of the number of groceries she brought to an express checkout lane. The Representative retracted her initial recollection of the incident. "The Babylon Bee" published an article referencing the incident titled "Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said 'My Pleasure'", which Snopes rated "false". They also this time suggested that the article was deliberately deceptive, rather than genuinely satirical. Ford responded on Twitter, highlighting what he deemed to be problematic wording in the fact-check. "The Babylon Bee" also released a statement, calling the fact-check a "smear" that was "both dishonest and disconcerting." The statement concluded by saying a law firm had been retained to represent "The Babylon Bee" because "Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and deplatform us." After receiving some backlash and a formal demand letter from "The Babylon Bee's" attorney, Snopes made revisions to the wording of the fact check and added an explanatory editor's note.
The "Bee's" chief executive, Seth Dillon, appeared on Fox News in August 2019 to discuss the feud between the "Bee" and Snopes. He said "The Babylon Bee" must take the matter seriously "because social networks, which we depend on for our traffic, have relied upon fact-checking sources in the past to determine what's fake news and what isn't. In cases where [Snopes] is calling us fake news and lumping us in with them rather than saying this is satire, that could actually damage us. It could put our business in jeopardy."
Snopes' co-founder David Mikkelson acknowledged to "The New York Times" that their fact-check was poorly written, but denied trying to discredit "The Babylon Bee." In an interview with "BuzzFeed News", Mikkelson stated, "the question you should be asking is not: 'why is Snopes addressing material from a particular site so often?' But, 'what is it about that site that makes its content trigger the fact-check threshold?'"
In August 2019, Snopes announced a new rating for satire sites called "labeled satire". Articles from "The Babylon Bee" that were previously rated "false" have been updated with the new rating. Snopes explains the label: "This rating indicates that a claim is derived from content described by its creator and/or the wider audience as satire. Not all content described by its creator or audience as 'satire' necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a distinction between 'real' satire and content that may not be effectively recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such." Mann objected to this label in an op-ed published in "Wall Street Journal", writing, that the label "is meant to suggest that we are somehow making jokes in bad faith".
"Not the Bee".
"Not the Bee", distinguished from "The Babylon Bee" but created in June 2020 by the same creators, is a non-satirical site that reports on news stories and commentary.