ActsSocial: Christian Faith Alternative to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok
Looking for authentic community with positive messaging, real connections, and content generated towards growth and edification? Plus protections that keep out negative and obscene influences? ActsSocial is your place to land. Built on the model of authentic community found in Acts 2.42-47.
ActsSocial is a Social Media site with Purpose. Founder and CEO Shawn Whitson explains all this and more in our podcast.
(Also, look for Shawn’s memoir “Called Out of Nowhere” being released in late fall 2026)
Shawn Whitson
Shawn Whitson is the founder and CEO of ActsSocial, a faith-first alternative gut-punch to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok built on the model of authentic community found in Acts 2:42 to 47.
By December 2022, Shawn had already spent three decades as an entrepreneur, building businesses that thrived and others that failed hard enough to cost him nearly everything. He wasn't looking for a new venture. Then, in the middle of an ordinary morning prayer time, God gave him a clear, specific, and entirely unwelcome assignment: take the Christian technology company he already ran and turn it into a social platform for a spiritual awakening he was convinced was already underway. He had run a technology company before, but nothing like a social platform, and no obvious reason to think he was the man for the job.
He built it anyway. Two years of financial strain, technical setbacks, and real opposition followed before ActsSocial launched publicly. Today it reaches believers, and plenty of people who aren't yet believers, in 195 countries and 12 languages, running on a proprietary interest-based, upside-down algorithm engineered to do the opposite of Facebook and TikTok: encouraging users instead of enraging them, with no ad-driven feed and no data harvesting.
Shawn's memoir, Called Out of Nowhere, releasing late fall 2026, tells the full and unusually honest story, failures included, of what it actually cost to obey a calling that size. He lives in Texas with his wife of 30 years, Sharee, and speaks candidly about building something he didn't choose and can't take credit for.