"I feel like it's just straight from God," she said. "It's like he blesses that coffee in particular."

More than anything, Wilson says, she loves Jesus — as the teenager from central Kentucky explains in "My Jesus," her debut recording that recently hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart for Christian music.

The bluesy gospel ballad's success doesn't end there: The official video has been viewed 6 million times on YouTube. A live version of the song, with co-writer and Christian artist, Matthew West, has been viewed more than 2.5 million times on Facebook.

A live EP from Wilson, which includes "My Jesus," has been streamed more than 37 million times, according to a press release from her record company.

But though full of full-throated praise, "My Jesus" is not a triumphal call to follow the Lord. Written after Wilson's brother was killed in an accident four years ago, the song reaches out to those who are going through difficult times. In that, it may be a hit for the COVID-19 era.

"Are you past the point of weary?" the opening lines of the song ask. "Is your burden weighing heavy? Is it all too much to carry? Let me tell you 'bout my Jesus."

Wilson, who co-wrote the song with West and Nashville songwriter Jeff Pardo, said her rapid rise to stardom began on a dark day.

After hearing the news of her brother Jacob, who was 23, Wilson said she went to a piano and began to play "What a Beautiful Name," a popular Hillsong Worship anthem. Her parents eventually asked her to play the song at Jacob's funeral.

The then-15-year-old, still in braces, later recorded a video of the song with some friends and posted it on YouTube.

"This song is dedicated to the loving memory of my beloved big brother, Jacob," Wilson wrote in the video's caption. "Thank you Jacob for always encouraging us to praise God, work hard, and always be kind. We love and miss you more each and every day."

That YouTube video, which itself has been viewed a quarter million times, caught the attention of a producer in Nashville and eventually led to Wilson signing with Capitol Christian Music.

"The unprecedented success of ‘My Jesus' is just the beginning, and we cannot wait to see what is to come for Anne," Capital Christian Music co-presidents Brad O'Donnell and Hudson Plachy said in a statement.

Wilson grew up in a Christian home, attending a Presbyterian church for most of her childhood. Her parents taught her about faith in God, and she says that she made that faith her own as a teenager.

Her parents also introduced her to country music, especially the songs of Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton. She remains a huge Dolly fan, citing Parton's 1980 hit "9 to 5" as her current favourite.

Though Wilson started playing the piano at a young age, she said that she had never sung in public before her brother's funeral. An astronomy and science buff, she said her childhood dream was to work for NASA.

Being a professional musician had never crossed her mind, she said.

In a phone interview, Wilson said she hopes Jacob is proud of her. The two were close growing up and she recalled his sense of humour and kindness. She recalled one day when, knowing that Wilson had stayed home from school because she was feeling sick, her brother decided to go out and hunt some squirrels for her.

Jacob took his hunting dog, Sally, out to the backyard, shot a squirrel and cooked it up for lunch. The meal made her laugh and was surprisingly tasty.

"We put powdered sugar on it and we dipped it in barbecue sauce, and whatever that combo is, it was so good," she said.

Wilson has spent the last two years honing her skills as a musician and writer and learning the craft of singing for a living. She's also moved away from her family's home, settling in Franklin, Tennessee, a Nashville suburb that's home to Christian music stars such as Amy Grant.

When not on the road, Wilson is working on songs for her album, due out next year.

The success of "My Jesus" caught her by surprise. She knew the song was good but was taken aback by how well it connected with listeners. Most of all, she said, she feels grateful.

"It's been a whirlwind of emotions," said Wilson. "Just thankfulness and gratefulness, watching God take my story, which was something so broken, and turning it into something so beautiful."

• Bob Smietana is a veteran religion writer and national reporter for Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Statistics provided to the UK Home Affairs Select Committee show that only 25,000 of nearly 15 million videos that were flagged as hateful or abusive between July and December last year have been removed.

Proportionately, the videos removed equate to just 0.17 percent.

The statistics were requested from YouTube as part of the parliamentary committee's inquiry into hate crimes.

The revelation prompted accusations from the committee's chair, Yvette Cooper, that YouTube and its parent company Google weren't "taking any of this seriously enough".

"We have raised the issue of hateful and extremist content with YouTube time and time again, yet they've repeatedly failed to act. Even worse than just hosting these channels, YouTube's money-making algorithms are actually promoting them, pushing more and more extremist content at people with every click.

"We know what can happen when hateful content is allowed to proliferate online and yet YouTube and other companies continue to profit from pushing this poison.

"It's just not good enough. Other social media companies are at least trying to tackle the problem but YouTube and Google aren't taking any of this seriously enough. They should be accountable for the damage they are doing and the hatred and extremism they are helping to spread."

YouTube says most of the videos were flagged by artificial intelligence rather than humans and computer programmes struggled with the "complex" area of hate speech.

The technology giant says the flags are often found to be inaccurate when reviewed by human moderators.

The UK select committee asked to see the statistics after Marco Pancini, YouTube's Director of Public Policy Europe, the Middle East and Africa, appeared before MPs last month.

The committee is now waiting for answers from Google on a number of other questions posed in the hearing.

Among these are why videos of the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings are still appearing on YouTube.

Google was criticised strongly after copies of the live stream posted by the shooter on Facebook was uploaded to YouTube thousands of times on the day of the terror attack.

A letter from the committee says one of the Christchurch videos had received more than 720,000 views.

UK Members of Parliament also want Google executives to explain why YouTube recommends videos of far-right figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson) even to viewers who have never watched such content.

Source

• The Telegraph
• The Times
• Image: Loop Vanuatu

At its first Catholic YouTubers Hangout meeting last month, dozens of Catholics from about 50 channels met online to discuss ways of bringing the Gospel to their YouTube channels.

Organiser Daniel Glaze said the idea for the Hangout came to him when he was watching a Catholic YouTube video and started wondering whether Catholics on YouTube knew each other or ever collaborated together.

Soon after finding others had similar questions the Catholic YouTubers Hangout had its first meeting. The free online conference was open to any Catholic YouTube channel.

These were defined as channels where the content explicitly talked about Catholicism and the Catholic church, or the creator of a channel is a Catholic who is letting their faith influence their work.

The Hangout goals are to create a community of Catholic YouTubers, and to encourage further collaboration within that community.

This community of Catholic YouTubers is necessary, Lewis said, because "Catholics need to get their voice in the hyper-progressive, strictly materialistic, and atheist and agnostic conversation happening on YouTube."

He said he has two aims: firstly he would like a "Catholic YouTube" of sorts - a corner within the platform dominated by explicitly Catholic conversations and creators, like there is on Twitter or Instagram.

Lewis says he also wants Catholics to be "part of every other corner of YouTube. We should be earning our rights to be heard in the conversations happening on ‘Gamer YouTube,' ‘Politics YouTube,' or ‘Movie-Nerd YouTube,'" he says.

"Having both of these [aims] is important to spreading the Gospel. The first is important for answering the explicit questions of people interested in the faith, the second is important for putting the Gospel in new places among the people of the world."

Source

• CNA
• Image: YouTube

It also removed a copy of a video about the revelations LifeSiteNews saved and posted to YouTube.

The video contained footage from the National Abortion Federation conference.

In this, abortionists admit they work they do is "killing," complain about how "difficult" it is to tear apart a foetus, and lament that they're not given a place to discuss the "heads that get stuck that we can't get out." Read more

Sr Cristina's very first video performance joins the list of social media's who's who including

• adorable animals,
• a multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercial,
• the iPhone 6 Plus bend test, and
• Simon Cowell's "Bars & Melody" golden buzzer act in Britain's Got Talent.

When The Voice judges asked the pop-singing nun what the Vatican would think of her appearing on popular TV show, the young nun was initially uncertain.

"I don't know.

"I'm expecting a telephone call from Pope Francis, certainly.

"Because he exhorts us to go out, to evangelise, to say that God does not take from us, but rather gives us more," she continued.

The fully habited nun, who this year shattered stereotypes with her voice and stage presence last week fulfilled her dream and met Pope Francis during the Holy Father's general audience in St Peter's Square.

Pope Francis and Sr Cristina chatted, shook hands, and she handed him a copy of her self-titled album, which includes a cover version of Madonna's classic song "Like a Virgin".

The Pope received the CD and responded with a smile.

While some Italian bishops privately questioned her behaviour appearing on the TV show and romping around the stage in a full habit, the whole Italian Bishops' Conference recently went public with criticism calling her "Like a Virgin" performance a "commercial ploy".

The nun defended her decision saying the song was "prayer-like".

Sr Christina's version of the song has received more than 4 million views on YouTube.

The singing nun is slated to perform at the Vatican's Christmas concert along with singer Patti Smith.

Sources

• Washington Post
• Crux
• Huffington Post
• The Voice
• Image: L'Osservatore Romano

The 55-year-old Archbishop of Manila, who will receive his red hat from Pope Benedict XVI on November 24, has a Facebook page with 100,000 fans and his YouTube commentaries on the Sunday readings go viral each week.

Continue reading

The parish's two busy churches, St Andrew's in Bicknacre and St Mary's in Woodham Ferrers currently "borrow" retired clergy and vicars from neighbouring parishes.

They have made repeated attempts to recruit a new vicar since the Rev Mary Cottee retired in June 2011.

Now villagers have made a video appealing for suitable candidates - using a cardboard cut-out to show exactly where the new clergyman will fit in.

The video -featuring nearly the whole village - opens with one parishioner being told off for the director for making jokes about the graveyard being the "dead centre of the village".

In his second take he says: "Here we are in St Mary's churchyard. It's a beautiful churchyard as you can see, but we have a grave situation - we have no vicar." Continue reading

Internet companies are a different breed. Because they traffic in speech — rather than, say, corn syrup or warplanes — they make decisions every day about what kind of expression is allowed where. And occasionally they come under pressure to explain how they decide, on whose laws and values they rely, and how they distinguish between toxic speech that must be taken down and that which can remain.

The storm over an incendiary anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube has stirred fresh debate on these issues. Google, which owns YouTube, restricted access to the video in Egypt and Libya, after the killing of a United States ambassador and three other Americans. Then, it pulled the plug on the video in five other countries, where the content violated local laws. Read more

Sources

• Somini Sengupta in The New York Times Sunday Review
• Image: GoodinBlogging

Somini Sengupta covers technology issues for The New York Times.

Joining forces with WITNESS, a global leader in the use of video for human rights, and Storyful, a social news-gathering operation, YouTube is keen to enable citizen journalists and organisations to upload footage on under-reported human rights stories.

"In the case of human rights, video plays a particularly important role in illuminating what occurs when governments and individuals in power abuse their positions," the official YouTube press release states.

"The channel is committed to providing new citizen creators as well as viewers with the tools and information necessary so that every citizen can become a more effective human rights defender."

"We hope this project can not only be a catalyst to awareness, but offer people new avenues for action and impact," notes the YouTube statement.

In recent times YouTube effectively offered a soundboard to Egypt's revolutionaries and educating 90 million-plus people about the atrocious crimes committed by warlord Joseph Kony.

Sources

• YouTube
• Huffington Post
• Image: YouTube

At a square in the city, they toppled a larger-than-life version of Qaddafi's Green Book—the cement pages were six feet by four feet—and cheers went up as the monument went down. The event was recorded on a cell phone and posted on YouTube, offering vivid proof that the uprising was for real.

The monument-toppling episodes that have emerged from the Middle East in recent months are exceptions; most of the uprisings have not relied on the visual clichés of the pre-digital age.

There are lots of reasons for this.

The most important of which is that camera-equipped cell phones are in the hands of everyone and Web sites like YouTube and Facebook are serving as distribution platforms; a far wider range of imagery is being produced by a far wider range of image-producers.

We are flooded with photos and videos that used to be exceptional, such as graphic shots of protesters being beaten and gunned down—or its opposite, protesters standing up to security forces and forcing them to flee.

Who needs effigies when you have the real thing?

Read more about the toppling of dictators in the YouTube age, accompanied by several YouTube videos of events.

Creating a rendition of the "wannabe weekend-party anthem," and giving it a holy twist, is the mission the Creative Arts Staff at the Community Christian Church gave itself.

"Sunday" lyricist Eric Bramlett told The Christian Post, "We wanted to make this thing as close to the original as we could, while trying to invite people to the Easter weekend service. We thought we could use this to spread the love and spread the fun so our attendees could invite their friends to our church too."

With addictive lyrics just like the original, "It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday " is replaced by "It's Sunday, Sunday, head to church on Sunday."

It's all about worshipping and looking forward to the Easter weekend for Sadie B., the main girl in the music video who happens to also be Bramlett's 12-year-old daughter.

While Rebecca Black ponders things like which seat to take in her friend's car, Sadie B. has more, or rather equally, important things to think about like ... front pew or back?

"Sunday's" popularity is quickly rising on YouTube. Released April 6, "Sunday" is already approaching 1,000,000 views.

Sources

• The Christian Post
• Sunday
• Image: YouTube