Written by: Shawn A. Akers
Article source: www.charismanews.com
Surprise—or not—Christian content posters are being shadow banned by yet another social media outlet. This time it’s TikTok, the fast-growing social media giant on the Internet.
According to a YouTube video by the AoC Network—a Christ-centered creator with a goal to represent God’s kingdom online, including its Christ-exalting Exploring the Bible series, had its reach “severely” to its more than 420.2 thousands of followers recently. And apparently, they aren’t the only ones who are suffering TikTok’s wrath.
According to Google, Tik Tok has about 732 million active users. An article on cnet.com in July read that Tik Tok’s mobile app had hit 3 billion downloads and became the first non-Facebook mobile app to reach that mark.
However, several Christian content posters have seen their accounts either completely banned from the channel or their reach to their followers limited by a large margin.
“We wanted to share our content about God because we believed that TikTok would help influence the minds of generations to come,” the AoC video proclaimed. “But suddenly, we noticed something happened with our TikTok account. Our videos were getting millions of views on the app, and suddenly, overnight, with the flip of a switch, we would upload a video and it would barely reach a thousand. Considering how many followers we had, we thought something might be broken.
“We were creating content about God, nothing controversial. Surely we weren’t being shadow banned. We thought maybe there was some kind of mistake because this was so abrupt. But when we spoke out about this, many other Christian content creators mentioned that they too, around the same time, suddenly were shadow banned. We started to look into it, and what we found was deeply troubling.”
Interviews with other Christian content producers revealed:
“I have almost 58 thousand followers, and all of a sudden, 16 people are seeing my videos,” one producer claimed.
“TikTok hates the gospel. I just preached the gospel live on TikTok, and sure enough, it was banned for violating community guidelines. Just talking about Jesus, the rapture and Israel is too much for them,” another producer says.
Jacob Coyne said this: “It looks like TikTok is targeting and censoring Christians,” Coyne says. “They banned my account today and I’m no longer able to post. If you’ve ever seen my content, you would know I only posting encouraging messages. I preach the content of Jesus to 1.2 million people every single day. It looks like there is an agenda here. Of all of the crazy things that TikTok allows on their app, they refuse to allow my Christian content.”
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Date published: 03/10/2021
Feature image: Image for illustrative purposes only. unsplash.com
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