Bobo & Flex started a Facebook group titled "The Bobo & Flex Show" on June 30, 2019, about 4 months after their first episode aired, as a way to continue the conversations on their podcast. Like many podcast communities, group members were expected to be podcast subscribers or frequent listeners, with moderators hired by Bobo&Flex, and Bobo & Flex themselves checking the Facebook group and contributing to the conversations. This became a way for listeners to critically discuss ideas, current events, and personal situations with each other, and maybe engage with Bobo or Flex — and, it gave Bobo & Flex inspiration for episodes, and scenarios to refer to while discussing topics.
The five rules of the Facebook group.
I didn't join the Facebook group until June 2020, but going back to read some of the posts from a year ago, and seeing so many posts refer to "the way the group used to be" (screenshot?) — it used to be a place where a member would post a thought or question, typically after an episode aired, for further discussion. But, it was mostly about episode topics, current events, or trends and less about personal life. With the growing popularity of the show, the group has since grown to nearly 16,000 members, and anywhere between 10-50 posts a day.
There's no way to know why the group quickly evolved to become more of a space for call-outs, poking fun at ignorance, and a place to vent about personal troubles (maybe if it would be interesting in the future, I can go through all the posts of the Facebook group for trends?). Many people blamed the option to post anonymously ( see Flex's announcment) as a way for people to post without being held accountable. But, after an incident involving many white members defending a racist comment prompted the post below — which is now the pinned post at the top of the group.
No bullshit — this also came as Bobo&Flex began to realize, although they talked mainly with POC in mind, the majority of their listeners are white.
Bobo & Flex refer to the evolution of the Facebook group often in their podcast — primarily how much it has changed their lives, how it's made them "influencers" and caused more people to demand more out of their time and personal space. Their second episode was on this — so it's not like they weren't expecting it as much as they were disappointed that people still do it. It's not uncommon for an episode to feature Bobo or Flex bringing up an instance where a random listener DMs them a question and gets upset when they don't respond for some time. They've done an episode with this at the center.
Less than two months after the pinned post above, Flex announced that all the hired moderators had stepped down; subsequently, she and Bobo decided to cut moderators (screenshot in toggle below) — the adults in the group should know how to navigate communication and discussion on their own, and if it got to toxic, they would delete the group.
Not much changed since then — but, the group evolves with trending topics and discussions in the group — for example, if there was a controversial post (likely about race or gender), there wouldn't be a controversial post for weeks at a time — but when the next controversial post came, the cycle would repeat. The controversial posts also revealed that there was a small but solid sub-section of the Facebook group who didn't know the group was associated with a podcast. So, for some people, the foundational context (previously) connecting everyone wasn't there.
Ashley Hurd, an active participant and former moderator, started making posts about how toxic she saw the group becoming. As someone who is friends with Bobo in real life and a leading voice in the group (especially being a Black woman who was willing to answer a lot of white people's posts about Blackness), posts about controversy and call-out culture in the group were listened to. Ashley was also one of the few BIPOC who frequently posted life experiences on the group, so many people (including me) felt like we got to know her a little.
<aside> 🚧 Still working on collecting all of the screenshots... wondering if this is even a useful example in our case.
</aside>
Many of these "controversial" posts are no longer available because they're deleted by the original poster — which are called "dirty deletes". Sometimes (especially since I joined), members have become conditioned to screenshot a spicy post in case it's deleted. One recent example was a woman with a Vietnamese name who posted a long rant about her boyfriend not buying her more for her birthday, although he had already given her $300 worth of jewelry and an expensive dinner. She got torn apart and made a meme of the group, but was later discovered to be someone with the Facebook URL "Olivia Johnson".
The next day, a woman named Stella Ofor posted about why transgender people were so accepted but blackfishers were called out and cancelled on the internet. Because the post was overtly transphobic, many people jumped on to call her out on her ignorance, some using pretty patronizing language. Stella kept on defending her question as valid — and I thought it was, although it was also transphobic. The post was deleted after being up for an hour, but someone screenshotted the entire thread and reposted it on the group, denouncing dirty deleting as a way of getting out of accountability as well as perhaps other subconsciously transphobic people from learning a thing or two. To make it jucier, it was discovered that Stella also carried the URL "Oliva Johnson" — so even though Stella still exists on Facebook and remains a part of the group (1.5 months later), we're still very uncertain about her actual identity.