The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters with me,

Winston Marshall at The Spectator. Today I'm joined by Seth Dillon, the owner and CEO of Babylon

B who are currently enjoying a lockout from Twitter over a joke. And Babylon B are

American political satire website and groups. So self-welcome, thank you so much for taking the

time to speak with me. What's going on? What can you tell me about this lockout? Yeah, I mean, it's a weird situation here where we're being required to delete a joke in order to stay on the platform,

or at least be able to continue to tweet on the platform.

Our account is still live. You can go visit it on Twitter, but we just can't tweet anymore until we delete this tweet that they want us to get rid of.

And what happened, I mean, the back story is just there was this report that came out in

USA Today that named Rachel Levine as one of their picks for women of the year.

And Rachel Levine is this transgender official in the health department.

And we did a joke, a take on that where we named Rachel Levine as our pick for man of the year,

kind of disputing this idea that Rachel Levine is actually a woman.

And it was a parody, a satirical take on that.

And it ran afoul of their hateful conduct policy.

So they consider this a case of misgendering.

It's hateful conduct, not allowed on their platform. In my view,

it's like, well, if you don't like this joke, fine, you can delete it yourself, but don't force

me to delete it and acknowledge that I engaged in hateful conduct when I don't think that I did.

You know, in my opinion, it's misgendering somebody when you call someone who's biologically male a woman.

I think that's misgendering, but they think it's misgendering the other way around. So,

you know, having those disagreements, fine. Twitter can have their policies, but don't make

us delete the tweet and admit that we engage in hateful conduct. We've refused to do that,

...