Drag Star BeBe Gunn Battles To Get Her Social Media Back
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Brisbane drag performer BeBe Gunn has opened up about the devastating loss of her Facebook and Instagram accounts, describing months of confusion, silence from Meta, and the emotional toll of being locked out of the digital community she spent years building.
BeBe spoke to The Star Observer about the experience and how it has effected her career and her mental health.
BeBe Gunn locked out of social media accounts
The last thing BeBe Gunn expected on a random weeknight was to have her digital identity whisked out from underneath her.
“It was a random Tuesday night, I was sat in my room and I had gotten a notification from Facebook asking me to confirm my identity. It was AI prompted. So I had done a face recognition scan for them and uploaded my Queensland driver’s license to which they said, sorry, you’ve been locked out of your account for the cause of fraud and deception” she revealed.
What followed was a confusing and frustrating ordeal that left BeBe, one of Brisbane’s most recognisable drag performers, without access to her professional and personal accounts and no reasoning “they are unable to tell me the specific thing that I have done wrong” she said.
Because BeBe’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were linked, both were disabled automatically.
“So because my Facebook and Instagram were linked on an account centre, I then was unable to log into my Instagram. I think that having a Facebook is less an issue, although still an issue for me, having an older clientele who utilised Facebook more than the younger generations are now, it’s proved quite difficult. So not having Instagram was really the issue.”
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Losing Years of Work
BeBe had built an impressive following across both platforms something she says meant a great deal to her career. “I had about four and a half thousand friends on Facebook and 14 and a half thousand Instagram followers, which for a local drag queen that hasn’t been exposed nationally, on television shows or through the media, I was really proud of what I’d been able to build.”
The loss, she said, hit hard. “It was a huge struggle to make contact with the person [at Meta]. So originally we had verified my mother’s Instagram and gotten her to speak to support but they are unable to speak to anyone who doesn’t own the account that they’re speaking about.”
“They’d Already Verified Me And Then Took the Accounts Away”
Setting up a new Instagram account proved far from simple. “I had to get a new Instagram which was difficult. They want to verify that you’re a real person, but they’d already done that, verified me and then taken the accounts away.”
Even once she was able to speak to someone, the process raised serious concerns about privacy and safety for queer artists in our current political climate BeBe says.
“When I finally got my account, I was able to verify my account by using my legal name and a picture of myself without makeup on, which I think is a huge issue when it comes to queer owned business. When we are, we’re kind of superheroes in a way, where we have like a mask we put on that we can in turn not have to give away personal details, especially when conservatives on the internet are targeting queer people and them knowing full legal names can be an issue.”
Despite her persistence, BeBe says Meta’s communication was slow and contradictory as she battled for answers from the social media giant. “It took them seven weeks to get back to me. I was contacting them every three days through their support channels, being like, hello, I want to know what’s going on. They had said 24 to 48 hours and seven weeks later they had just said to me, no, you won’t be having the accounts back. A human has looked at it and we’re standing by the decision.”
“One of the phrasings that I remember was, we’re not saying that you did anything wrong, we just can’t give you the accounts back.”
“It felt really odd to me, like I had gone through the fraud and deception part on their website and it’s mainly rooted in financial fraud. So I have no idea where that would have come from. I have no clue.”
After months of waiting for her suspended accounts to reappear she fears they will soon be gone completely.
“It’s been going on since August, so it’s been a really long process of trying to get this. And pretty much they give you 90 days to appeal the decisions, which I’ve done and they’ve been unsuccessful. So I have a feeling that quite soon my accounts will be scheduled for complete deletion, which obviously means I will never be able to retrieve them.”
Trying to Rebuild
BeBe is now rebuilding from scratch, reconnecting with fans and collaborators wherever she can.
“My strategy to rebuild is just, you know, reconnecting with all the people that have meant something to me by posting about them. So, you know, there’s images that I’ve posted so far with DJs and drag queens and my reels. I still have my TikTok, which has got nearly 75,000 followers.”
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But managing to translate followers from one platform to another is not an easy task she says.
“People don’t want to click another button and go and support these causes because they already follow me on TikTok. They don’t need to follow me on Instagram in their minds. So the strategy to rebuild is just try to be consistent.”
She says social media has become both a vital and exhausting part of queer artists’ livelihoods. “I think social media is such a tough thing for most people these days because it’s not real. And we’re talking about consistently posting on social media so we have careers. What happened to the days of just being good at our jobs? This is part of our jobs now, which is so difficult.”
Community Support and Silence from Meta
BeBe says she’s grateful for the outpouring of community support, including from Queensland MP Grace Grace but she says Meta remains silent.
“The support from my networks has been wonderful. I’ve had a lot of support from wonderful people, including Grace Grace who’s a long-term friend of mine and the member for McConnell. She is just such a wonderful woman and she’s a huge advocate for people in our community. She did reach out to see if there were things she could do. I’ve had other friends reach out and give me contacts and emails, but no one’s responded to an e-mail, no one’s responded to any phone calls or anything.”
BeBe believes her story is part of a broader pattern for drag performers.
“There are a lot of similar situations where this has happened. About 10 years ago there was a very big issue with drag names on Facebook where a lot of people lost their accounts and had to use their legal names.”
She recalls one support call to Meta that left her deeply uneasy.
“One of the things that was said to me through the support channels was that it was a an issue with fraud and deception that I was a man pretending to be a woman and then taking bookings on Instagram and Facebook. So it was just a support person over the phone when I’ve finally been able to get a hold of someone that’s saying these things.”
“So I don’t know how much this is rooted in… queer issues, how much this is rooted in misogyny, how much this is rooted in all of these different things. But there is a pattern of queer artists losing their social media at the moment because the AI is being informed by their owners. And right now, Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Meta aren’t doing an awful lot to protect queer artists or queer people in general.”
“I Don’t Want to Go to a National News Network, I Just Want My Instagram Back”
While BeBe is no stranger to advocacy, her Pay Your Bills campaign to support queer artists during lockdown saw her get national attention, she doesn’t want to have to go to those lengths for something that should be so simple.
“Admittedly, I wish that I could come to you with better news with an article we could write that would say, this is the way that you’ve got to go about getting this back” she says.
“At the moment, it feels like I should be going to bloody a current affair and we can do a story on it. Because anybody that goes to major media outlets seems to have more success than I and I don’t want to have to go to a national news network to try and get information picked up so I can have my 14,500 followers back. I just want my Instagram back. I don’t even want the Facebook back.”
The impact on her work has been immediate. “It’s had a huge impact on my work, I’m not selling as many tickets as I was and I’m not accessing the same amount of people who we click through a story or two and say, ‘Hey, I saw that BeBe’s got a show on this weekend. Let’s go to that!’ I’m not seeing those people at the moment and those people are sometimes not realising that I’ve disappeared. Unless you’re actively searching for my content at this point, maybe you’re unsure that I’ve disappeared off your social media.”
But it’s not just work that has been impacted for BeBe, the ordeal has seen her struggle mentally as well as she tries to keep her career on track.
“It’s really taken a toll on my mental health. It’s really been difficult when you’re going through mental health struggles as an artist, having a community of people that you’ve built that constantly uplift you and validate that part of your existence, to have that taken away has been incredibly hard and heartbreaking.”
Still, BeBe remains hopeful. “I’m very hopeful that my community will see BeBe’s got this new social media and come back and maybe share a thing or two or buy a ticket to a show because at the moment it’s tough out there.”
You can follow BeBe Gunn and her new Instagram via the link below.
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