An SPLC Data Lab investigation of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant content on The Babylon Bee and its sister site, Not the Bee, has uncovered multiple controversial businesses formerly run by owner Seth Dillon, along with the identities of 14 pseudonymous Not the Bee writers, despite the website's efforts to keep information secure.

The Babylon Bee is a right-wing satire site that borrows a format from the satirical news outlet The Onion while amplifying far-right rhetoric and disinformation. Its sister site, Not the Bee, is a junk-news site with salacious headlines about culture-war issues designed to stir up right-wing outrage. Dillon, who purchased the Bee in 2018, has been tight-lipped about his past businesses, with prior biographical articles making only vague references to his history in "e-commerce" or a "legal filing service."

Publicly available data reveals that from 2004 to 2011, Dillon operated two term-paper writing services, Custom-Writing.com and TheWriteElements.com, which charged up to $18.95 per page to write term papers for college students.

The Write Elements website listed Dillon's phone number, and that same phone number appeared in data sets stolen from Elance, a now-defunct freelancer search service, and later leaked to the public internet, where the Data Lab viewed it. Along with the phone number, the Elance data breach also listed email addresses for "sdillon" and "Seth Dillon" at both of the term-paper websites...