Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon has announced his satirical website’s filing of a brief in support of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Big Tech crackdown legislation, Fox News reports.
“We face some of these censorship problems, we’ve faced challenges with fact-checks being abused to try and get us de-platformed and knocked off the platform,” Dillon told Fox & Friends First. “There are new policies now that are aimed at curbing and minimizing hate speech, but really they’re going to affect satire like ours because they consider some of our jokes ‘punching down’ because we aim at some of their sacred cows.”
In a statement, legal organization First Liberty Institute says it filed an amicus brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11 Circuit for its clients, The Babylon Bee and Not the Bee, both of which “have faced increasing censorship and ‘shadow banning’ on social media,” it says.
“Our brief lays out the case that Florida’s law is a basic consumer-protection regulation that simply holds social media platforms accountable to the image of neutrality that they project,” the statement says. “In particular, we explain why requiring social media companies to transparently announce and evenly apply their own rules is consistent with federal law and the First Amendment.”
The statement adds that social media companies, rather than applying their content standards neutrally across the board, have selectively applied their rules “in order to censor religious and conservative users.”
“We just want the tech companies to be transparent about what the rules are and then apply them equally,” Dillon was quoted as saying in the First Liberty statement. “At a minimum, we want social media platforms to evenhandedly apply their content standards.”
Dillon told Fox News of his high hopes for the outcome.
“I’m optimistic, I think ultimately, this will be resolved,” he said. “It will either be resolved because Congress is going to end up revising Section 230 language to make it a little bit more explicit about what needs to happen there, you know ‘good faith’ is kind of vague.”
“I’m optimistic that there is going to be a solution,” he added. “It may have to go to the Supreme Court.” {eoa}
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