2 Sep 2023 8:44 pm
The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christiannews satire website that publishes satiricalarticles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion.[1][2][3]As the readership of The Babylon Beeincreased from 2016 to 2020, there were independent, ongoing discussions within journalistic circles on how to handle the rise of fake news and its influence on the public.[35][36][37] The Babylon Bee was brought into this wider conversation when several of their articles were shared on social media or reported upon, ostensibly as factual, including President Donald Trump commenting on a story that claimed "Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News"[35][38] and British newspaper The Guardian reprinting as factual a Bee-doctored image of LeBron Jameswearing a lace collar supposedly in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.[39]
The Conversation published research by academics at the Ohio State University 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 Babylon Bee as news, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so.[40