According to Vimeo, Seth’s discussion about being censored over the ‘Man of the Year’ joke had gotten the David Horowitz Freedom Center banned. A year after Twitter was ridiculed and then taken over for classifying Babylon Bee’s humor as hate speech, Vimeo sent out a letter announcing “Seth Dillon – The Babylon Bee was removed for Hate Speech.“ The letter refused to name anything hateful that had been said or to specify what in the talk triggered the ban.
The focus of Seth’s talk had been about the different forms of censorship that the site faced. He delved into the internal process that led the Babylon Bee to approve the ‘Man of the Year’ joke even knowing that it risked bringing the wrath of Big Tech down on them.
“We were going back and forth when we pitched this joke,” Seth Dillon had told us at the Restoration Weekend. “This by the way is one of the ways that they censor people. They censor you after the fact, but they also censor you before the fact. There’s pre-censorship that happens because people are afraid to make jokes and statements like this knowing they will probably get censored, so they censor themselves. My writers come to me all the time saying, ‘I’ve got a really funny joke, but if we publish this, we might get banned.’”