Video sharing site, YouTube has suspended an account of popular Nigerian televangelist and miracle worker, Pastor Temitope Balogun Joshua, over supposed hate speech.
The suspension was handed out after a UK-based rights group, openDemocracy, filed a complaint.
According to openDemocracy, it filed the complaint after reviewing at least seven videos posted on the YouTube channel of TB Joshua’s Ministry, the Synagogue Church of all nations.
A YouTube spokesperson told openDemocracy that the channel had been closed because its policy “prohibits content which alleges that someone is mentally ill, diseased, or inferior because of their membership in a protected group including sexual orientation,” reports the BBC.
The video is an update of a prayer session of a woman called Okoye, first broadcast in 2018.
In it, TB Joshua slaps and pushes Okoye and an unnamed woman at least 16 times and tells Okoye: “There is a spirit disturbing you. She has transplanted herself into you. It is the spirit of woman,” openDemocracy reports.
The video which was viewed more than 1.5 million before the YouTube channel was taken down, later shows her testifying before the congregation that “the spirit of a woman” had been destroying her life but she had been healed after the preacher’s prayers.
She declares that she had stopped having “affection” for women and “now I have affections for men”.
T.B. Joshua has responded by calling YouTube’s action in a Facebook post as hasty. “We have had a long and fruitful relationship with YouTube and believe this decision was made in haste.”
Meanwhile, Facebook has also removed a copy of the video that had been posted on the Facebook timeline.