This article was underwritten in part by the Mickey Flacks Journalism Fund for Social Justice, a proud, innovative supporter of local news. To make a contribution go to sbcan.org/journalism_fund.
It started with a notification from Meta. One Tuesday in early July, Cooper Bedin (a k a drag queen Jaundice Joplin) checked their phone. Bedin co-runs an account to promote BARBARA, a monthly drag show they put on alongside queens Aria Cummingtonite (Jon Bingaman), Linda (Sam Rosen), and Cherry Von Illa (Jake Marshall).
“I opened Instagram and clicked through my accounts, and everything seemed normal,” Bedin said. “I was very confused. So I just kind of ignored it.”
Meta also removed the UCSB drag club account, a page for student performers and fans of drag that the queens run. The next day, Bedin tried to access the BARBARA account. A message told them that Meta had deactivated it on suspicion that it had violated the company’s community guidelines.
“It was, like, one sentence long,” Bedin said. “There’s, like, one button that you can click to appeal.”
Bedin appealed. The account had never received any previous warnings, and they weren’t sure what guideline it was accused of violating — Meta never specified. But eight minutes later, Bedin got a new notification: The account had been shut down completely.
“The process in general doesn’t make sense,” said Rosen, who regularly performs and emcees the BARBARA show. “You violated community guidelines. You don’t know what guideline you violated. There’s no citation of the rule.”
For nearly a year, Bedin, Bingaman, Rosen, and Marshall had built the account’s following and content, promoting their own drag and dozens of other local performers through photography and videos. The four also regularly posted about themed upcoming shows and brunches, held at EOS Lounge each month.
With the account shut down, all of that content, as well as Bedin’s personal Instagram and Facebook accounts (which were linked as Bedin’s in the account administrator), were eliminated. Once an account is removed, the person who created it cannot restart a new one. They are permanently blocked.
Ana Garcia, a member of the group SBResiste. | Credit: Courtesy
The queens of BARBARA aren’t the only folks in town who have experienced issues with Meta removing content or features. SBResiste, a grassroots organization of volunteer members who patrol and monitor ICE activity, including arrests in Santa Barbara, has not been able to live stream since April. Their Instagram page has nearly 8,000 followers and is full of resources for people affected by ICE deportations as well as ways for the community to help.
Ana Garcia, a member of SBResiste, manages the organization’s social media account. She said that one morning in April, she was using Instagram’s live feature to document ICE agents’ activity outside of the South County jail.
“We were at the jail, and we were just recording what was happening while ICE agents were in the lobby, doing what they do, and our live got shut off right then,” she said.
Meta then informed her the page’s live feature had been revoked for a year, due to the page’s violation of community guidelines — again, they were unspecified.
As with BARBARA, Garcia had an opportunity to appeal. She did so and was informed “almost instantaneously” that the appeal had been rejected.
Meta’s shutdown of the BARBARA account is part of a trend of the company removing Instagram accounts and posts without warning. Reports of removed content have increased in the past several months, coinciding with Meta’s move toward artificial intelligent content moderation earlier this year. In March, Meta announced it was replacing the majority of its content moderators with an AI system. The company said that the change would roll out over time and that humans would be kept on staff for complex cases.
In the following month, tens of thousands of accounts, including small businesses, reported being removed or censored. A Reddit forum with 26,000 weekly visitors is entirely dedicated to people who have reportedly had their accounts erroneously banned. In hundreds of posts, people say they do not know what guidelines they violated.
Meta’s guidelines have also shifted in recent years, with the company alleging it will increase free speech. Meta updated its comment guidelines in January 2025, permitting people to call queerness a mental illness and refer to women as household objects. That came the same month that Meta sunset its fact-checking services, which used third-party fact checkers to flag misinformation as “disputed.”
Cooper Bedin performs as Jaundice Joplin in BARBARA and co-runs the monthly drag show’s Instagram account. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom
“We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a Meta blog post.
Back in Santa Barbara, Garcia revisited SBResiste’s live stream ban again in June; she tried to find a way to talk to a human being at Meta after AI had failed her.
“I was like, ‘We can’t not have [the] live [feature] for a year. That is a huge blow to our ability to communicate to our community in a timely fashion,” she said.
Garcia said she went in circles with an AI chatbot for about 30 minutes before being contacted by a human being (again in chat format). The person said they would review the issue and respond to Garcia. That was a month ago.
Garcia still doesn’t know why the live stream was cut and the ability to stream was removed — that there’s nothing substantially different between SBResiste’s stream and what other accounts post. She said because the live stream was cut, she doesn’t have access to the recording to review it.
After running into a series of chatbot errors, Bedin, Bingaman, Rosen, and Marshall took to social media, posting about their issues with Meta and the loss of both accounts. That post made it to a local Meta employee who applied for internal review. Without that help, the queens said, they would have reached a dead end.
The Independent reached out to Meta for a request for comment via email. A human being responded and began the process of looking into what happened to the specific accounts before offering a comment. They did not respond with an update in time for the print deadline.
For both BARBARA and SBResiste, Meta’s content moderation tactics reveal the relative power the organization (and its AI) has in the flow of information.
Bedin, a computationalist linguist with a background in computer science, said that AI models, like the ones Meta may use, have biases: racist, sexist and homophobic biases baked into how they were trained. In its AI Resources Hub, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan Technology Services details how source data and design can prompt biases and hallucinations in AI systems and points to research on how AI has been shown to have racist, sexist, and political biases. It’s unclear whether there’s a pattern of biases in Meta’s post and account removals.
For Garcia, the experience points to the need to expand the ways in which information is distributed. Social media is an important tool, she said, but censorship from tech corporations limits it. And, she said, people should keep speaking up about injustices.
“I keep kind of saying to myself, to those around me, when I have an opportunity to do so on social media, ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway,’” Garcia said, “because the fear is the tool that they’re using to keep us suppressed and subdued.”
