Non-profit organization PragerU, founded by radio host Dennis Prager to produce short informative videos on conservative topics, has been permanently banned from the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok for “multiple violations” of the platform’s community guidelines. According to PragerU, Silicon Valle has a “proven track record of silencing conservative voices and being against free speech,” and TikTok has joined a “competition for who can be the most woke.”
PragerU told Breitbart News that it has reached out to TikTok several times to get more information and clarity on why its account was blacklisted but has yet to hear a response.
Moreover, PragerU personalities Amala Ekpunobi and Will Witt went to TikTok’s U.S. headquarters in Culver City, California, to ask the company’s employees in person why the organization’s account was banned — but all of the employees appeared to be working remote.
“We went to the TikTok office to get to the bottom of the ban. Unfortunately, all of their employees are working remote. (and by ‘working’ I mean ignoring our emails),” wrote Ekpunobi in an Instagram caption.
PragerU also mentioned that one of its TikTok posts featuring Dennis Prager recently went viral, adding that it was a short clip of Prager talking about the gender wage gap, and that the PragerU account was banned shortly after the clip reached 3 million views.
While the organization says it is not sure whether the two incidents are connected, but noted that the viral TikTok post featuring Prager was their most successful video.
“It’s not a coincidence that TikTok banned our account at the same time that we were experiencing explosive growth on the platform,” PragerU Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri told Breitbart News.
“Over the past few weeks, we gained over 50,000 new followers with nearly 120,000 followers in total and our videos were reaching millions of young people,” the chief marketing officer continued. “It’s clear that TikTok doesn’t want young people to hear conservative ideas, but we’re going to fight back.”
“Since TikTok has not responded to any of our requests for more information, we went ahead and made a new PragerU account with the handle ‘PragerU.com’ and we encourage everyone to follow our new page,” Strazzeri added.
In response to whether PragerU believes the permanent ban is specifically a Chinese decision, Strazzeri said, “it’s hard to know what role China is playing in content moderation decisions on TikTok, but unfortunately Big Tech companies right here in the United States have a proven track record of silencing conservative voices and being against free speech.”
“Every big business is in a competition for who can be the most woke and they are destroying our country,” Strazzeri added.
The organization has also launched a petition to tell TikTok to reinstate PragerU’s account.
TikTok is just the latest tech platform to censor PragerU. The group has also faced censorship from several other platforms, such as Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, and YouTube.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler @alana, and on Instagram.
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