Fears for kids over hate preacher on TikTok
HATE preacher Anjem Choudary has boasted of joining social media apps popular with children – raising fears that is planning to spread his vile message to a wider and younger audience.
The 54-year-old cleric, who was jailed in 2016 for encouraging people to join IS, has opened TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest accounts.
Other social media accounts created by Choudary, who was released on licence in 2018 but placed under strict rules that limited his ability to proselytise, were recently closed but he has since managed to rejoin Facebook and Telegram.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, he bragged: ‘I have them all up my sleeve. I’m signed up to all of them.
‘TikTok is for uploading small clips and talks and doing conferences and stuff like that. Obviously, I will be doing it Islamically.’
Chinese-owned TikTok has almost nine million active users in the UK and a billion users across the globe.
Snapchat has more than 21million subscribers in Britain and almost 300million daily users across the world, while Pinterest has more than ten million users in the UK and a global reach of almost half a billion.
After being alerted by TMoS, Telegram last week shut down Choudary’s channel, but within days he had opened another, called Islam Is The Answer.
Choudary opened a new Facebook account two weeks after the company closed down his first. The page, which is called A Call To Islam, is described as a ‘personal blog’.
Sam Armstrong, a director at the Henry Jackson Society national security think tank, said: ‘He should not be allowed to use social media in this manner.’