Pastor: Facebook throttling Christianity

A pastor who says he once had as many as 8 million people a month interact with his Facebook page, now has a fraction of the audience due to the "fake news" algorithm change and claims the social-media giant is severely restricting distribution of Christian-themed posts.

"Facebook is blocking almost everyone from seeing John 3:16, 'The Old Rugged Cross,' the resurrection of Jesus Christ and my other posts," wrote Steven Andrew.

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He still has a sizable audience, he said, with 467,000 people liking his page, but Facebook is showed such posts to only hundreds of people each.

"I am being silenced by Facebook. Christianity is being silenced!"

Andrew said he spent thousands of dollars with Facebook advertising to build up his following, and before the "censoring" he reached 5 to 8 million people per month, with an average post going to 30,000 to 60,000 people.

Some posts reached a million people, he said, but after Facebook announced a crackdown on "fake news," he was "shadow-banned," blocking about 5 million people per month.

"Christianity is not fake news," he said.

Andrew said Facebook has not addressed his concerns and also has not removed more the more than 70 fake accounts impersonating him "that scam his followers for money."

"Facebook caused the loss of millions of dollars in donations and the ability to grow my website traffic," he said.

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In response, Andrew, who describes himself as a "Silicon Valley internet leader, who has run multi-million dollar Fortune 500 initiatives," is building a new social network called USA.Life he hopes to launch this fall, as WND has reported.

"There is no censoring of Christianity and our American rights at USA.Life," he said.

The Gateway Pundit blog said in May it's "no accident" that conservatives are censored on Facebook.

Since January 2017, when Facebook began making algorithm changes that limited the influence of conservative news outlets, the Gateway Pundit's Facebook traffic "has consistently decreased with each algorithm change."

A March 2018 study by The Outline organization found conservative publishers were hit the hardest by Facebook algorithm changes, the blog said.

The Western Journal also published a study that found conservative publishers were hit the hardest by the recent Facebook algorithm changes. The report found that liberal publishers actually saw a 2 percent increase in traffic while conservative publishers lost an average of 14 percent.

The Gateway Pundit noted Facebook official Campbell Brown, a former anchor on NBC and CNN, told attendees at a recent technology and publishing conference that Facebook planned to censor news publishers based on its own internal biases.

"And they did," the blog said.

Related column:

Look who is crying out for censorship by Joseph Farah

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