Salt Bae is really making the news all over again. On Tuesday, Facebook’s parent company made a statement saying that it had unblocked the hashtag for celebrity chef Nusret Gokce’s #saltbae. Apparently, the tag had been blocked a few days after a video was posted online of Gokce serving a gold-encrusted steak to a senior Vietnamese Communist Party official in London.
“We’ve unblocked this hashtag on Facebook and we’re investigating why this happened,” a spokesperson for Facebook operator Meta told Reuters, confirming the tag had been blocked for all Facebook users around the world, not just in Vietnam.
Facebook
However, it was not clear why the tag had been blocked, and the spokesperson also refused to comment on potential reasons. According to reports, a search for the tag said that community standards have been violated.
In a US Congress hearing earlier this year, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said artificial intelligence plays a major role in “content moderation”, responsible for taking down more than 90 per cent of content deemed to be against Facebook guidelines.
AFP
The video was originally posted on Gokce’s official TikTok account and showed Vietnam’s Minister of Public Security. It was filmed last week and showed the minister eating a gold leaf encrusted steak by the internet-famous chef at his London restaurant. The price of the steak is 1,450 pounds (Rs 1,45,851).
Lam, 64, was in Britain during a visit by senior Vietnamese officials to the UN climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow.
However, the video sparked outrage in Vietnam, given the country’s economic condition and a state crackdown on corruption.
In one Facebook post, user Nguyen Lan Thang, with nearly 150,000 followers, changed his profile picture to a screenshot of the video and pointed out that local media had been staying quiet over the incident.
“Security officers following this account, have you seen the video of minister To Lam eating salt-sprayed beef? Do you know how many months salary you’d have to spend for just one piece of that steak?” Thang wrote in one post.
However, it is unknown who paid for the meal.
To Lam did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Vietnam’s foreign ministry, which handles foreign media enquiries.
The original video was removed from Gokce’s TikTok account shortly after it was uploaded, and further copies have been removed from the app for violating “community standards”, Vietnamese TikTok users told Reuters.
TikTok and Gokce also declined to comment.
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