Facebook COO Wants Platform To Get Involved With Religious Services | The Daily Wire

When churches began moving online amid the pandemic, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, made national headlines in April 2020 when Google suspended their app from the Google Play store after the tech giant deemed its content “insensitive.” At the time, Pastor Ben Zornes worried about the potential consequences of Big Tech getting involved with faith-based institutions. As the Washington Examiner reported:
The Christ Church app remains available to iPhone users in the Apple Store, and the church’s channel is still up on YouTube, but as churches and synagogues move online and would-be worshipers are arrested for congregating in person, some are concerned about the power tech companies could wield over religious institutions, even unwittingly.

The purpose of the suspended app was to provide their quarantined congregation with “sermons and a couple podcasts helping our people think biblically about the coronavirus,” Zornes explained. “What does the Bible have to say? How should we think about these things during this time, doing what we believe pastors and the church should be doing, which is helping people not live in fear and helping them to love their neighbor? And apparently, that was flagged somehow.”
Regarding the possibility the app was flagged deliberately because of the theological content of their coronavirus-related podcasts and sermons, Zornes said, “We just don’t know,” but added, “I think the thing that’s of concern for us is what other topics could they suppress? Positions that the Church has held for years, and for millennia, derived from Scripture? If they just have a switch to kill our platform and to take away our microphone, it doesn’t seem like they’re very favorable for free speech.”
Two days after the original publication of the Washington Examiner’s story, Google reached out to Christ Church to inform them their app had been reinstated unconditionally.