How Elon Musk Saved @TheBabylonBee from Twitter Jail | Real Talk | PragerU

there was a there was a story that came out in USA Today about how Rachel LaVine was named uh woman of the year and and Rachel LaVine is this transgender Health admal the it's a male person and with a wig on or I don't know maybe just his own long hair I don't know but you've got this absurd story you see and you it feels like satire it feels like it's straight out of a South Park episode but it's real this is in you know foxnews.com reporting this and you look at that and you're like well first of all how do you saiz that and then we could we couldn't sat satire relies so much on caricature kind of drawing out the you know and exaggerating something that's that's true you take it a step further you can't do that with a story like that there's no way to make it more absurd than it is reality is more absurd than the Babylon exactly like nobody would have believed you 30 years ago if you told them that a woman of the year was going to be a man that's they wouldn't have even been able to comprehend what are you talking about why would anyone ever do that and and how would why would anyone take it seriously well we do take it seriously because it's become so normal now that we see these things but we had we decided like we can't really exaggerate this so the headline that we came up with as as our joke on the back of this ridiculous you know headline was um The Babylon be's man of the year is Rachel LaVine so we named Rachel AR pick for Man of the Year and of course that's provocative and it's according to the standards of Twitter at the time not any longer thankfully but at the time it was considered misgendering which falls under the hateful conduct policy um which is so ridiculous you know the the USA Today piece misgendered uh by calling you know a man a woman um but we you our by telling that joke we had an internal debate like do we tell this joke should we put this joke out there because if we do then we might end up getting censored we might end up getting completely deplatformed so you knew it might cause some trouble oh yeah yeah I mean anytime you do that we knew what the rules were and we knew that we were violating a rule when we when we posted it and we're like you know this is this is really important that there be these kinds of stands that you're willing to take where you say look we're not going to play by these rules and because if everybody just plays by the rules the rules win and the bad ideology wins and then the culture loses yeah and so at some point there has to be a large number of people it's got to start somewhere somebody has to do it somebody has to be willing to say no we're going to we're going to post this even if it means there's a consequence and then we'll deal with that when it comes and so we hit send tweet and you know through out there and of course that's when we ended up getting locked because it was immediately reported by a lot of you know the trans activists and whoever else got a hold of it and reported it for hateful conduct so we got this message saying that we were locked out of our account and we needed to delete that tweet but it was only like two days after that happened that we were when we were locked out initially that we got a message from Elon Musk he dm'd us and he was like are you guys locked out at Twitter is that true are you suspended and we couldn't respond to him because we were we were locked out like we could read the message but we couldn't reply you can't post a reply I can't even imagine yeah so we're like uh we need to get in touch with Elon Musk and I don't know how to do that um so we didn't respond to his message because we couldn't and then he uh he found our number dug it up from somebody and called and had a conversation with us about it what is it like getting a phone call from Elon Musk uh well first you question whether it's real did you think yeah is this really Elon you sound like Elon Musk are you really how do how do you test him to whether or not it's really Elon Musk on the other end of the line um but yeah he was just he couldn't believe it you know he's like comedy should be legal you you should be able to tell jokes like this you know it's not that he necessarily agreed with the joke and thought that it was a good joke it was the the principle of the matter that we should be allowed to tell the joke and that we shouldn't have this kind of censorship and so he uh uh he joked at the end of that conversation that you know he might just need to buy Twitter and of course you know it was we thought interpreted as yeah haha you know that's that's great you know way to make us feel like there is hope but we don't really believe you you must be kidding right so um when it actually became clear that he was making moves to acquire the platform we were of course just you know cheering as loud as we could from the sidelines like please let this go through because we knew we knew that if he took over the platform he would unlock us so how long after Elon Musk took over Twitter you were freed he wanted to do it on day one so day one uh he walked into Twitter with that sink in his hands you know let that sink in that famous moment and in in the first thing he did he messaged me and he said do you want the be restored there will be no censorship of humor and so that was day one as CEO he sent me that message however he did get a lot of push back internally so he was almost like a little bit prematurely met reaching out to me personally before he had actually gone and talked to the people about like you know I love that about him by the way it's like the perfect CE that forgets that there is an HR department processes exact so ideal yeah he's like no I'm just doing this this is what I want to do it's my company now I'm going to do what I want I'm bringing back the Babylon B and then he sat down like I think the Washington Post did a write up on it um he he was sitting down with like the trust and safety team and and uh and they were they were telling him look you can't do that you can't just break the rules change the rules first if you want to if you want to have different rules change them and then go through that process but like if you an exception for the Babylon be then it's like why then everybody else will question why you're not making exception for them it creates problems you know you have to go through procedures and so it was like all right he's not unlocking US yet what's going on and he said you know just give me time because I got to work through some of these things so it was a a process that he went through where eventually though he got fed up with it and just said I'm bringing back I think it was the Babylon B Jordan Peterson and Kathy Griffin those three randomly all on the same day nice little balance yeah yeah yeah and then uh from that point forward it was like every week he what was he calling it like forgiveness Fridays or something like that no it was it was something like that he made up some phrase for like um when he would pardon people and like every week he was like pardoning new accounts and unlocking these accounts and so but it was it was probably about uh a month or two after after he took over that he actually did unlock the be and then we tweeted you know we're back let that sink in