Facebook has not banned the Lord’s Prayer

Multiple posts on Facebook wrongly claim sharing the Lord’s Prayer is against the social media platform’s policies. 

The posts, which all have identical text, say: “After hearing [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg and Facebook saying that posting the Lord’s Prayer goes against their policies, I’m asking all Christians please post the Lord’s Prayer [...]” before going on to share the prayer. A number of posts have more than 500 shares. 

However, a spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, confirmed to Full Fact that posting the Lord’s Prayer is not against its policies. Similarly, there’s no mention of Christian or other religious content in Facebook’s community standards, which outlines what is and isn’t allowed on the site.

The very fact the posts haven’t been deleted also suggests posting the Lord’s Prayer does not breach any policies that would subsequently lead to its removal. 

This is not the first time Full Fact has seen posts making this claim. When we fact checked similar claims in June 2020, we said the claim could have stemmed from a 2016 online article which claimed all “Christian themed content” would be banned from the social media platform, supposedly citing a Facebook representative named “Riker Jepson”. However, we found no evidence that this report was genuine and the claim has not been reported by any reliable sources.

US fact checkers Snopes also fact checked a similar false claim about Facebook supposedly banning all religious content back in 2014. 

We’ve written about other false claims concerning social media and technology companies, for example that Facebook will suddenly share private posts, all Instagram messages will become public and Google Meet is introducing a button to turn on all cameras. False claims like this can create unnecessary alarm and change how people engage with these platforms. 

Full Fact is part of Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking programme, through which we receive funding to identify, review and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta does not determine which checks Full Fact publishes or have any editorial control over our content.