The Stud Says Its Trans Parties Got Flagged as Trafficking. Meta Pulled the Account.

The Stud got its Instagram account back at about 6:40 on Saturday evening, the night before Dore Alley. It had been down since at least Friday; for much of the weekend, anyone who went looking for the bar's page got an error message.

Meta suspended the account of the Folsom Street club — reputed to be San Francisco's oldest gay bar — after what the bar says were bad-faith reports accusing its old posts of “human trafficking.” The reports, according to the owners, targeted posts about the club's trans parties.

“We are a promoter-driven club, and we rely on our Instagram to get the word out about our dance and drag nights,” co-owner Honey Mahogany said in a video posted to her own Instagram as the weekend approached, as Metro Weekly reported. “But recently, we've been targeted by someone who is flagging our trans parties as engaging in human trafficking.” Mahogany is a drag performer who, per Mission Local, also directs the city's Office of Transgender Initiatives.

Dore Alley weekend

Dore Alley is the annual leather, kink and alternative-sexuality street fair in SoMa, and the smaller sibling of the Folsom Street Fair in September. According to the co-owners, speaking to Mission Local, it is an important financial cushion that helps carry the club through slower months.

“The Stud is a labor of love,” Mahogany said in the video, as SFist rendered it. “We are a collectively owned venue where none of the owners have seen a profit.” Having its only source of marketing shut down that weekend, she said, was “going to be devastating to our club.”

Co-owner and general manager Rachel Ryan told Mission Local what the page actually did: “We relied on the page, because it combined marketing, ticketing, and communications with clients and performers.” Losing it on a moment's notice, she said, was something she couldn't describe.

The sequence, per the owners: Meta warned them earlier in the week that a suspension was pending over an old post, and they appealed immediately. The account went dark anyway — Mahogany's video appeal went up on Friday, and Mission Local reports the bar was formally notified on Saturday afternoon that the page was disabled. One of the co-owners told the San Francisco Chronicle, as Metro Weekly reported, that the initial appeal was rejected before the account came back. (How old the offending post was isn't settled: Mission Local was told months; the Chronicle was told more than a year.)

The account returned Saturday evening with its 32,000 followers, per Mission Local, after an online outcry and pressure from state Sen. Scott Wiener and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey. “I'm glad it's back up,” Dorsey said.

Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold confirmed the restoration to Mission Local in an email — “The account has been restored” — and gave no reason for the original suspension. Metro Weekly says Meta never answered when it asked about the flagged posts and the suspensions.

It wasn't only the Stud

Instagram also suspended the account of San Francisco's Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District the same week, restoring it Saturday evening, executive director Bob Goldfarb told the Chronicle, as Metro Weekly reported.

The post that triggered it, per Goldfarb, promoted an event at the Stud and showed two shirtless people in puppy masks. The photo was flagged twice, he said, and removed after false reports that it “may show sexual activity.”

“Anyone who was familiar with sexual activity would not think that was possible,” Goldfarb said. His larger complaint was about the process: “They don't really give you any information about what part of the post was violating their community standards, so we have no way to change things going forward.”

A couple of clicks

“I'm not trying to accuse Meta of nefarious intent; they have the right to try to control this unruly platform and I understand the reasons they established certain checks and balances,” Ryan told Mission Local. What alarmed her was how little effort it took: “some random person sitting on their computer, digging through archives of our events, can have the power to flag us with serious allegations and enact this very un-American censorship with just a couple of clicks.”

“We're glad that someone at Meta discovered the mistake and fixed it,” Ryan said. “Obviously the most beloved gay bar in San Francisco isn't engaging in human trafficking. So that algorithm needs a little tweak.”

Nobody has established who filed the reports. Wiener called it targeted harassment by right-wing extremists in his post on X; that is a lawmaker's read, not a finding. What is on the record is the owners' account of what was reported and why — and the fact that Meta, having restored both accounts, has not said what was wrong with either of them.

Our read

Here's our read, and we offer it as people who maintain listings for rooms exactly like this one. A gay bar's Instagram is rarely just marketing. Ryan's own description of the page covered marketing, ticket sales, and talking to both clients and performers: one account doing three jobs. The venues most likely to be built that way, we'd guess, are the small community-run ones operating close to the line.

That's the asymmetry that bothers us. Filing a report takes a stranger, in Ryan's phrase, “a couple of clicks.” Absorbing one takes out the channel Mahogany calls their only source of marketing, days before Dore Alley. The Stud came out of this intact — the account was back before the fair, and Dore Alley went ahead on Sunday — though its co-owners say the suspension may still have cost the club revenue, per Metro Weekly.

It also had things we doubt most rooms have: a co-owner who runs a city office, a state senator and a supervisor willing to say so publicly, and enough of a name that the outcry got loud. Meta never said what changed its mind. Mahogany spent Friday asking the internet whether anyone happened to know somebody who worked there.