Article By Ayesha Peterson // EEW Magazine Online // News

The TikTok app has been in the news a lot lately, mainly because President Donald Trump believes it may be a threat to national security.

Now the supremely popular app owned by Chinese company ByteDance is grabbing headlines for another reason: Christian rapper Kanye West views it as harmful to young children and wants to create an alternative called “Jesus Tok.”

In tweets posted to his official Twitter account Monday, Aug. 17, the multi Grammy-winning lyricist said, “A vision just came to me… Jesus Tok.”

According to the superstar producer and founder of the Sunday Service ministry who announced his conversion to Christianity and changeover to strictly gospel music in 2019, the idea was sparked during daddy-daughter time.

“I was watching Tik Tok with my daughter, and as a Christian father, I was disturbed by a lot of the content, but I completely loved the technology,” he said.

TikTok, which has over 100 million U.S. users, many of them teenagers or young adults, features short-form videos with a large majority of them being lip-synch videos, where users dance and sing along with their favorite songs. Many of TikTok’s millions of uploads are fun, light-hearted, innocent, and even informative, but some of its content is known to be racist, sexually explicit, and unsuitable for children.

West, a 43-year-old father of four, said, “We pray we can collaborate with Tik Tok to make a Christian monitored version that feels safe for young children and the world.”

West is not the first parent to express concern over TikTok’s potential harmfulness to children, not just because of adult video content, but because it has also been a hiding place for predators according to an extensive report on Buzzfeed.

ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017 then bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined the two.