By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Tuesday, July 5, 2022

The Babylon Bee, the popular conservative Christian satire site, has been kicked off another platform, this one owned by a Chinese tech company.

The Bee was banned without explanation last week from TikTok, three months after being frozen out by Twitter for a tweet jokingly naming transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year.”

“Yes, we have been banned. No, they did not tell us why. And there is no option to appeal,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon told The Washington Times.

The short-video app TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Last year, the Chinese government-owned firm acquired a minority stake in the company’s main subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology, according to the South China Morning Post.

The Washington Times has reached out to TikTok for comment.

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Mr. Dillon also said in a Friday tweet that FrontHQ has “terminated our email service for allegedly violating their user conduct policy.”

He posted a June 16 email from FrontApp, an email communication app, saying the subscription had been canceled “effective immediately” due to violations of its End User Conduct and Content Policy, which prohibits a host of offenses, including “hateful speech” and “harassment and bullying.”

A Front spokesperson declined to comment on the cancellation.
“As a company policy, Front does not comment on specific customers nor its internal decisions about relationships with its customers,” said the spokesperson in a Tuesday email.

The Babylon Bee can be found on platforms including Facebook and Instagram, but remains locked out of Twitter for refusing to delete the Levine tweet.

Last week, Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their platforms, saying that it “functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool” and raising concerns about Chinese access to U.S. data.

With 1 billion monthly users, TikTok was the most downloaded app both in the U.S. and worldwide last year, ahead of Instagram and Facebook, Apptopia reported.

— Ryan Lovelace contributed to this report.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.

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