Why does Meta keep suspending the Instagram accounts of gay bars?

This story originally appeared on Them.

The owner of the Anthem Orlando nightclub says that Meta suspended the venue’s Instagram account shortly after the city’s October Pride celebration, marking yet another LGBTQ+ business that has had its social presence scrubbed by the social media giant in recent months.

“On Oct 20, two days after Pride weekend, @anthemorlando was suspended,” Mike Vacirca, the club’s owner, wrote on Threads on Thursday.. As of this writing, the handle hasn’t been restored and a second account, @anthem0rlando, with a zero in the place of an “o,” has also been suspended. “The notice cited the Community Standards but named no post or policy. We appealed the same day and haven’t heard back. We're not alone.”

Vacirca went on to ask in the Threads post, addressed to both Meta and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, if someone could “get our appeal in front of a human reviewer” while also asking whether anyone is investigating “why queer venues keep getting caught” in the site’s filters for suspension.

Vacirca also pointed out in the post that another nightclub, Savoy Orlando, had a similar issue with their social media accounts being frozen. Currently, no Instagram page is available for either @savoyorlando or for @savoyorlando_, a replacement page that was announced on Instagram in July after its first page was taken down, per an Instagram post from Orlando-based drag queen Trixie Deluxxe.

“Unfortunately, we’ve lost access to our previous Instagram account, so we’ve started fresh here,” the post reads.

Orlando observed LGBTQ+ Pride on Saturday, October 17 with the procession beginning right outside Anthem Orlando’s front door. The bar was also recognizing its anniversary of one year in operation.

“One year ago, on Pride weekend, we opened our doors on Orange Ave,” the bar wrote in its anniversary post. “Spaces for queer joy kept disappearing, so we built one: a home for Central Florida's LGBTQ+ community in the heart of downtown, where we gather, make art, celebrate out loud and find joy. One year in, the mission hasn’t changed. It just has receipts now.”

Vacirca’s post comes just two weeks after Scott Neal, the president of Austin, Texas-based gay bar Rain on 4th, told local news outlet Chron that Meta had disabled Rain of 4th’s page on July 30 without any explanation.

After having its original page deleted, Rain on 4th opened a new page which was then deleted while its old page was restored on August 21. Neal was eventually able to speak to a person at Meta about the page being taken down; most of the posts flagged by the company, Neal said, did not feature nudity, or even any of the scantily-clad dancers who work at the bar; instead, the posts featured G-rated photos of drag queens.

“Those are not marked as inappropriate,” Neal said, referring to the photos of the dancers, “but a smiling drag queen is flagged.”

Them has reached out to Meta for comment about the ongoing trend of LGBTQ+ bars having their accounts suspended and will update if we hear back. At the time that Rain on 4th’s account was suspended, Chron had reached out to Meta for comment and the company declined to comment.

Several LGBTQ+ businesses nationally and internationally have fallen victim to a murky and unknowable suspension process at Meta which, per reporting in the New York Times, is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence bots for content moderation.

This trend has also affected Wilka’s Sports Bar in New York and the San Francisco-based gay bar The Stud, both of which now have their accounts back. Per reporting in the Los Angeles Times, the restoration of Stud’s account came after the bar publicly pleaded with tech workers who frequented the establishment, including Meta employees, to intervene.

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