Facebook unblocks hashtag for celebrity chef Nusret Gokce’s nickname #saltbae

Facebook has unblocked the hashtag for celebrity chef Nusret Gokce’s nickname #saltbae!

It wasn’t made clear why the hashtag had been blocked.

The development comes days after a video was posted online featuring chef Nusret Gokce feeding a gold-encrusted steak to a senior Vietnamese Communist Party official in London.

While being blocked, a search for the hashtag #saltbae generated a message saying community standards had been violated.

“We’ve unblocked this hashtag on Facebook and we’re investigating why this happened,” a spokesperson for Facebook operator Meta told Reuters.

The spokesperson confirmed the tag had been blocked for all Facebook users around the world, not just in Vietnam.

Vietnamese minister has been under criticism over ‘Salt Bae’ gold-plated steak dinner

Public security minister General To Lam dinned at the chef’s famously expensive London restaurant, Nusr-e earlier this week.

 

Reportedly  the gold-covered steak ranges from £850 to £1,500 ($1,140 to $2,015). And the price is not listed online and it’s also not clear that it is without drinks, side dishes, or the 15% service charge.

The original video has been 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.

While 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.