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- TikTok last week confirmed it banned a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota.
- Former State Sen. Scott Jensen had more than 280,000 followers when his account was disabled.
- The company told Axios that Jensen was banned for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
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Scott Jensen, a Republican running for governor of Minnesota, was banned by TikTok for spreading COVID-19 misinformation against its guidelines, the company said late last week.
Jensen on Thursday posted a 2:15 video to Twitter explaining that he'd been banned from using TikTok, for violating its community guidelines.
"It's really pretty confusing, but it sure feels like being canceled," Jensen said.
"I've said it more than once and I'll say it again. If it can happen to me, why couldn't it happen to you?" he added.
Jensen, who served one-term as state senator, said in the video he'd been using TikTok for less than a month and had gained 286,000 followers. His videos had been liked 1.2 million times and they were getting around 100,00 views every day, he said.
A TikTok spokesperson confirmed to Axios that Jensen had been removed for violating guidelines related to spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The company spokesperson did not say which videos violated the policy, according to the report.
In his video Thursday, Jensen said he had previously appealed videos that had been removed from the platform for policy violations and said some of them had been restored. Just before he was banned, Jensen said he posted two videos that criticized the recent 60 Minutes report about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
-Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) April 9, 2021
"I don't know what could've happened," he said.
Jensen later told Axios he hadn't posted anything about COVID-19 within the past 24 hours and wasn't sure if previously removed posts were about the disease or about vaccines.
"A complaint regarding [misinformation] regarding COVID-19 is so broad I don't know how to respond," he told the outlet. "It seems like anything that goes against the conventional mainstream might be construed as misinformation."
As The Minnesota Reformer, previously reported, Jensen, a family doctor, had grown his national presence over the last year through appearances on Fox News. The outlet noted one recent video Jensen posted to TikTok was captioned "Family doctor EXPOSES double masking craziness," while another was captioned "You are being played (by the CDC and WHO)."
He has previously repeated the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 death toll is over calculated, the Reformer noted, and he's criticized the Minnesota governor for enacting restrictions to curb the pandemic, according to the report. Last year, Minnesota regulators investigated a complaint against Jensen's medical license, though it was later dismissed, Axios noted.
Jensen said he joined TikTok to reach out to millennials on the platform as part of his campaign. Few candidates used the platform leading up to the 2020 election, largely due to concerns over the app's ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance, though more candidates and politicians have more recently appeared on the short-form video app.
