YouTube terminates channel promoting violent exorcism to ‘cure’ LGBTQ people from ‘the demon of homosexuality’
YouTube shut down earlier this week the channel of a prominent African preacher who promotes violent forms of LGBTQ “conversion therapy.”
The news comes after openDemocracy, a U.K.-based human rights group, notified the platform about possible abuse of hate speech in a channel run by T.B. Joshua, the founder of The Synagogue, Church of All Nations, a megachurch in Lagos, Nigeria.
The organization reviewed and analyzed seven videos in which Joshua sought to “cure” LGBTQ people.
In response to our enquiries about TB Joshua’s controversial exorcisms, YouTube terminated his channel. Facebook says it has removed certain posts, but a number are still visible
(via @5050oD)https://t.co/SBsnpbh57O— openDemocracy (@openDemocracy) April 17, 2021
The clips, posted between 2016 and January 2020, show the the controversial preacher “engaging in violent exorcism” in an attempt to change the sexual orientation of people by casting out “the demon of homosexuality,” according to openDemocracy.
One of the videos shows Joshua pushing a woman’s head making her fall to the floor. When she gets up, he hits her again and tells her to call another woman, whom he calls her “wife.”
The preacher slaps and pushes the two women at least 16 times. The video then fast-forwards to events a week later, when the woman confirms that because of the preacher’s intervention, she has “no affection whatsoever” for her former partner.
“Now I have affections for men,” she said.
YouTube, which “prohibits content which alleges that someone is mentally ill, diseased, or inferior because of their membership in a protected group including sexual orientation,” agreed that Joshua had crossed a line.
A YouTube spokesperson told openDemocracy that the platform’s community guidelines “prohibit hate speech and we remove flagged videos and comments that violate these policies. In this case we have terminated the channel.”
The channel was shut down on April 12.
According to the BBC, Joshua is one of Africa’s most influential evangelists. His followers included some of the continent’s top politicians.
His YouTube channel had over 1.8 million subscribers.
Recent posts shared on TB Joshua Ministries’ Facebook page claims that the preacher has cured people who suffered from blindness, deafness, diabetes, bronchitis, chest pain, toothaches and high blood pressure — through the power of prayer.
The church’s Facebook account, which has more than 5.6 million followers, hasn’t been terminated, though the social media giant said it’d “removed a number of pieces of content from this page for violating [hate speech] policies.”
“Facebook took a piece-by-piece approach to removing the content but left some online, including one of the seven that our reporter [Kerry Cullinan] flagged to them,” openDemocracy tweeted. “A 16-minute video in which a gay man is slapped and his dreadlocks cut off.”
Daina Rudusa, spokesperson for the global LGBTQ rights organization OutRight Action International, celebrated YouTube’s decision.
“It is great to see social media platforms take a greater role in tackling these harmful practices by banning accounts spouting hate speech and promoting conversion practices,” she said in a statement.
