On Friday, President Trump tweeted a story from a rare source: The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical site compared to a conservative edition of The Onion.
“Twitter is shutting down the entire network to slow down the spread of negative news,” says the article headline. The story is a joke, but it’s hard to tell if Trump knew when he shared the link, with the comment “Wow, this has never been done on hitale. “
New York Times reporter Emma Goldberg recently brought The Babylon Bee and wrote about how the satire of the site is occasionally with reality.
I with Mrs Goldberg your article, Babylon Bee’s habit of circumventing the line between incorrect information and satire, and how it capitalizes on the confusion of your audience.
Emma, you wrote about The Babylon Bee, a satirical news site that has fascinated me for a long time. It’s the right-hand edition of The Onion, isn’t it?
What fascinated me about reporting this is that I’ve been following The Onion for a long time, but The Babylon Bee has been getting more traffic lately than they do, at least in their internal numbers.
It’s so interesting! (By the way, I now have some knowledge of Facebook’s engagement, and that tells me Babylon Bee had about forty-five million interactions with his Facebook page last year, compared to The Onion’s 35 million. )Is the bee that good?
Well, they don’t fire any punches, their mantra turns out to be that everything is fine: the left, the right, Trump, and overall, on the right, Trump sweeping notices it as a red line, but The Bee doesn’t seem to care.
They have also approached many other people who are not extremist Trumpers, but who are much more disappointed by Trump’s outrage on the left.
That’s right, some kind of anti-Trump crowd. Are the other people running pro-Trump? What are they planning to do in the wider conservative movement?
They are ambivalent about their views on Trump, but they also proudly identify as conservative Christians, but I realized that their initial policy with Trump in 2016 was much more scathing than it is today: they called him a psychopath or megalomaniast. Now they are more through it and the macabre manners he described on the left.
But I think his willingness to hit him, even gently, achieves a vital detail for a successful humor. What media expert Brian Rosenwald told me was that humor will have to go before politics.
So this is a blog about distortion and misinformation, and I recently discovered that many of Babylon Bee’s most successful publications in terms of online participation are what are Array . . . less openly satirical.
Totalement. Et put them in water.
Like, the other day called “NBA Players Wear Special Lace Necklaces to Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “
People shared this thinking it was real.
Yes!
They are betting this on virality: their most productive content is right in the line of the satire of reality.
I wonder the extent to which being satirical, which exempts them from Facebook’s data verification program, has allowed them to manipulate false data under the pretext of comedy. Do you think this is a planned strategy?
Well, that’s a wonderful consultation because it’s been a great source of controversy for them. They had some pieces that were verified through Snopes and classified as “fake”. What the writers and editors of The Bee claim has led Facebook to threaten them. with being unmonetized (Facebook denies it). Bee’s founder Adam Ford stated that Snopes had “flagrantly” verified them, with criteria that would not apply, for example, to The Onion.
The bee feels it is being an unfair target, but Snopes insisted that his articles infrequently can be fluent with genuine news, which could fall on them, not their readers.
Apart from politics, this bears witness to the more unlikely nature of being a satirical site in the era of megaplatform, because on the one hand, you have to write things that are so clearly invented that they can’t be rather with genuine news. , but also close enough to the fact to be fun.
One hundred percent. Truth is more fun than fiction in those days.
One thing I have is what the entire media trading complex “owns libraries” (which I would classify The Bee as property, even if it didn’t) would do if Trump lost in November. Do you feel that The Bee cares?
The funny thing is, because they’re not loyal to Trump, they can see a merit in their comedy anyway. Somehow, comedy is much less difficult when you’re not the ruling party. But on the other hand, Trump is a great actor, absurd character who can lend himself to crazy caricatures. The publisher of The Bee told me that Trump was wonderful in comedy, so I would be pleased to see him win; a little later, he added that they might have had enough of Trump’s mood and that they were in a position for a change. They also see many opportunities for humor in Biden’s field, adding gambling on the “Sleepy Joe” motif.
So what I don’t forget about this verbal exchange is: The Babylon Bee is not a secret disdata operation disguised as a right-wing satirical site and tries to do comedy, but it can inadvertently spread incorrect data when other people take their stories. Too seriously?
On the top. But they also seem to find it quite funny when their content is combined with genuine news, and they don’t go too far to avoid it.
News How Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical site, capitalizes on the confusion of New York Times partners.