meta deleted california's queer clubs from instagram for months. they came back when reporters and politicians started asking why.

via the Los Angeles Times (August Brown), Mission Local and SFist, here and here.

The first sign that Club Cobra had been erased was the condolence texts.

Marty Sokol, who owns the North Hollywood club and its sister bar Club Chico in Montebello, told the Los Angeles Times that Cobra's Instagram vanished on New Year's Day. Chico's went in May. By June 1, he said, every one of his clubs' pages was suspended, plus about a dozen belonging to his staff and promoters. AI-driven search engines started listing his clubs as permanently closed. Longtime regulars, reasonably concluding the place had died, texted their sympathies.

"Your audience goes to look for you, and you are gone," Sokol told the Times. Nobody at Meta ever told him why.

which clubs lost their pages

Cobra and Chico are fixtures of queer Latin nightlife in Los Angeles. Catch One, the Mid-City venue that was founded as the city's first nightclub for Black lesbians, lost its Facebook page and its access to Meta's ad platform in May; its owner, Mitch Edelson, estimated to the Times that ticket sales fell by as much as 80 percent. Club Tempo, the East Hollywood vaquero bar, lost its Facebook page. Audry Cobra, who hosts the trans club night Transfix at Cobra, lost both of her professional pages a year ago. "Anything trans-related feels targeted today," she said.

Sokol noticed who was not on the list. "We are gay, we are Latino, and we are a very specific group," he said. "West Hollywood appears to be unaffected by this problem."

It is not only Los Angeles. In San Francisco, The Stud, the co-op on Folsom Street often called the city's oldest gay bar, lost its Instagram in July, right before the Dore Alley street fair, after old event posts were flagged for "human trafficking," Mission Local reported. SFist has since tallied Powerhouse, which lost Instagram and Facebook in late August, the SF Eagle, which had to start a new account from scratch, and Beaux in the Castro, whose third Instagram account in a year was suspended on September 15.

how the pages came back

Here is the pattern, and it is the whole story. Sokol spent months going through what he called the proper channels, including an AI appeal that he said asked him to upload a passport, a driver's license and a facial recognition scan. Nothing. Then the Times contacted Meta, and Cobra, Chico, Audry Cobra's pages and the staff accounts all came back the following weekend.

Catch One got its Facebook page back on September 10, after Assemblymember Mark González, a member of the Legislature's LGBTQ caucus, reached out on its behalf. "My office has a longstanding relationship with Meta," he told the Times. The Stud was restored about 6:40 on the evening Meta disabled it, after a public campaign and a post from state Sen. Scott Wiener ending, "Meta should reverse this ban immediately." Beaux's newest account came back the day after it went down, after its general manager, Joshua Cook, posted on his personal Instagram asking anyone with a contact at Meta, or in the press, to help.

And the ones without a line in stay gone. Beaux's two earlier accounts were never restored, per SFist, including the original with more than 24,000 followers. The new one has about 2,000.

what meta says

Almost nothing. Meta offered the Times no statement and no reasons. When The Stud came back, a Meta spokesperson emailed Mission Local, "The account has been restored," and did not say why it had been suspended. The company moved more of its content moderation to AI with a new flagging system in March, amid thousands of layoffs, and a spokesman, Daniel Roberts, told The New York Times, as the LA Times quoted him, that "We're committed to making fewer enforcement mistakes and helping individuals protect their accounts," adding that "A.I. is delivering on both."

It delivered Club Cobra to Google as permanently closed. The Stud's co-owner Rachel Ryan put it most gently: "Obviously the most beloved gay bar in San Francisco isn't engaging in human trafficking. So that algorithm needs a little tweak."

Sokol's version is less polite and more useful, because it names the actual appeals process. "Without a seat at Meta's table," he said, "we will all be closed."