Sean Feucht, a Bethel Music worship leader and prayer proponent, has been participating in peaceful prayer gatherings around the country. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley this week called out Instagram for blocking Feucht’s videos from being shared without explanation.
“Cancel culture meets #BigTech,” Hawley wrote. “Now @instagram is censoring a Christian worship leader who wants to post videos of praise and worship from places where there has recently been unrest. And that doesn’t meet ‘community standards’? Can’t wait to hear the explanation for this.”
Cancel culture meets #BigTech. Now @instagram is censoring a Christian worship leader who wants to post videos of praise and worship from places where there has recently been unrest. And that doesn’t meet “community standards”? Can’t wait to hear the explanation for this https://t.co/QoQcpEo2q8
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 23, 2020
READ: Instagram calls worship videos “false information”
Feucht’s original tweet said, “This is what we’ve come to in America! Instagram is now classifying my WORSHIP videos as ‘harmful or false information.’ Religious Liberty? Freedom of Speech? Big Tech censorship?”
Feucht told Fox News how his videos came to be censored.
“I’m a leader in the faith community,” he said. “I’m also an artist and I have a worship and missions ministry. One of the things we’ve been doing since [the recent U.S. protests] started happening is, we’ve been going to a lot of these places and bringing a unified — black, white Hispanic, Asian — just a unified coalition of people together, worshiping and praying, and peacefully protesting
“We did it in St. Louis under the archway, a couple of blocks from where four cops were shot a night or two before. It was still pretty crazy there. Then we did Minneapolis. We have people in Manhattan and all kinds of places but myself personally, I was there in St. Louis and then Minneapolis. What was happening was, for whatever reason my videos on Instagram were being flagged as harmful and did not meet the community standards.”
The California resident and father of four said he realized what was happening on Instagram only after other users complained to him that they weren’t able to share or view any of his recent content.
“I noticed the videos were being suppressed and they weren’t getting the normal traction,” he explained. “But I didn’t know this was the reason until I started getting tagged in people’s posts about it. Other people were finding they couldn’t share it, screenshot it — they couldn’t even view it. So I blew the trumpet on it because this is crazy.”
Hawley agreed.
“In the last few weeks alone, Twitter called President Trump’s promise to enforce the law — which the Constitution requires him to do — ‘abusive,’” he told Fox News. “Google threatened to demonetize conservative news sites, and now Instagram decided to censor a Christian worship leader for posting praise and worship videos. There is no accountability for these companies who engage in censorship, and this is why Congress needs to reform Section 230 and end the sweetheart deal for these companies.”
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice