YAPPIE EXCLUSIVE—Facebook’s deletion of the popular matchmaking group Subtle Asian Dating was a mistake, a spokesperson for the social media platform said on Thursday — capping a dramatic 24 hours that rattled the group’s administrators.
“The group Subtle Asian Dating was removed by mistake and has been restored,” the Facebook spokesperson told The Yappie. “Our teams review millions of reports every week and sometimes we make mistakes. We’re always working to improve our accuracy and we’re really sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
Subtle Asian Dating (SAD), a romance-focused offshoot of the wildly successful meme group Subtle Asian Traits, allows its 300,000-plus members to advertise — or “auction off” — their single friends to potential partners through humorous posts which are often jam-packed with emojis and mentions of boba.
The group abruptly went offline at 10 p.m. PST on New Year’s Eve. SAD’s administrators, who had temporarily turned off new post submissions for the holidays, were left with a single notification from Facebook that read: “We reviewed your group, subtle asian dating. It still had content that went against our Community Standards on adult nudity and sexual activity, so it’s been deleted.”
“This wasn’t the first time our group had received a notification that we had violated [Facebook’s] community standards,” SAD co-founder Hella Chen said. “But this time, I couldn’t enter the group or do anything that would ensure we could meet that standard. Our group was gone just like that.”
It is not immediately clear what spurred the latest review — Facebook said it is currently examining why SAD’s administrators were not given the opportunity to appeal the group’s removal.
SAD was previously suspended over content related to adult nudity and sexual activity in November 2018, Chen noted, and that administrators have since implemented post approval procedures. “We haven’t been a perfect group,” Chen stated, “but I also felt a deletion was a bit too extreme as we had done what Facebook wanted, which was build a community.”
“I value Facebook as a platform … but it also felt frustrating to see the group being removed at a notification. As an admin, it definitely makes it hard to trust Facebook since we’re always at their discretion,” she continued.
After the group’s removal on Monday, administrators issued strongly-worded statements through SAD’s Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts calling for its reinstatement, and moved quickly to launch a backup group (now archived here).
“One thing that made this different was the fact that [SAD] had many offshoot groups,” Chen said. “We were able to use those groups for support and to communicate with them what had happened.”
“As admins, all of us do our best in whatever capacity we can to engage with others… we want to be approachable and we value discussions,” she reiterated.
While Facebook restored the original group by Wednesday afternoon, Chen said that “I felt okay [with] Subtle Asian Dating being gone in the sense that I could see us using this new group as a way to create a better version… and that maybe with a smaller initial start, it could foster a better community.”
Amid political firestorms over misinformation and extremism, Facebook says it has taken steps in recent months to increase transparency around its community standards. In April 2018, the social media giant published the internal enforcement guidelines used by its roughly 15,000 content reviewers and announced that it would expand its appeals process regarding content removed for nudity, sexual activity, and harassment — among other areas.
As for SAD, the administrators are moving forward with plans to recruit more moderators for the new year and will continue to emphasize the importance of keeping posts “subtle.”
And after a roller coaster of emotions and confusion, Chen says that she and the other administrators are “glad that SAD is here with us in 2019.”
With additional editing from Alex Li, Sunwoo Park, and Annie Song. Subscribers get early access to exclusive stories like this one. Subscribe for free now.
