{"id":324541,"date":"2026-08-19T01:09:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T01:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/324541\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T01:09:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T01:09:28","slug":"meta-censors-accounts-of-santa-barbara-drag-queens-ice-observers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/324541\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Censors Accounts of Santa Barbara Drag Queens, ICE Observers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0BARBARA<\/a>, a monthly drag show they put on alongside queens Aria Cummingtonite (Jon Bingaman), Linda (Sam Rosen), and Cherry Von Illa (Jake Marshall).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI opened Instagram and clicked through my accounts, and everything seemed normal,\u201d Bedin said. \u201cI was very confused. So I just kind of ignored it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s community guidelines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was, like, one sentence long,\u201d Bedin said. \u201cThere\u2019s, like, one button that you can click to appeal.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bedin appealed. The account had never received any previous warnings, and they weren\u2019t sure what guideline it was accused of violating \u2014 Meta never specified. But eight minutes later, Bedin got a new notification: The account had been shut down completely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process in general doesn\u2019t make sense,\u201d said Rosen, who regularly performs and emcees the BARBARA show. \u201cYou violated community guidelines. You don\u2019t know what guideline you violated. There\u2019s no citation of the rule.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For nearly a year, Bedin, Bingaman, Rosen, and Marshall had built the account\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the account shut down, all of that content, as well as Bedin\u2019s personal Instagram and Facebook accounts (which were linked as Bedin\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Ana Garcia, a member of the group SBResiste. | Credit: Courtesy<\/p>\n

The queens of BARBARA aren\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ana Garcia, a member of SBResiste, manages the organization\u2019s social media account. She said that one morning in April, she was using Instagram\u2019s live feature to document ICE agents\u2019 activity outside of the South County jail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta then informed her the page\u2019s live feature had been revoked for a year, due to the page\u2019s violation of community guidelines \u2014 again, they were unspecified.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As with BARBARA, Garcia had an opportunity to appeal. She did so and was informed \u201calmost instantaneously\u201d that the appeal had been rejected.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s 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 \u201cdisputed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Cooper Bedin performs as Jaundice Joplin in BARBARA and co-runs the monthly drag show\u2019s Instagram account. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a Meta blog post<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Back in Santa Barbara, Garcia revisited SBResiste\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018We can\u2019t 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Garcia still doesn\u2019t know why the live stream was cut and the ability to stream was removed \u2014 that there\u2019s nothing substantially different between SBResiste\u2019s stream and what other accounts post. She said because the live stream was cut, she doesn\u2019t have access to the recording to review it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For both BARBARA and SBResiste, Meta\u2019s content moderation tactics reveal the relative power the organization (and its AI) has in the flow of information.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s 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\u2019s unclear whether there\u2019s a pattern of biases in Meta\u2019s post and account removals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI keep kind of saying to myself, to those around me, when I have an opportunity to do so on social media, \u2018Feel the fear and do it anyway,\u2019\u201d Garcia said, \u201cbecause the fear is the tool that they\u2019re using to keep us suppressed and subdued.\u201d<\/p>\n

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