Stop scapegoating drill rap – New York Daily News – New York Daily News

In February, Mayor Adams blamed drill music for some violent crime and called for the removal of drill videos from social media. Then he backtracked, met with some drill rappers, and said he’d work with them to address gun violence. Then last month, three drill rappers were reportedly kicked off the Rolling Loud Festival’s lineup at the NYPD’s request.

But if you think New York’s actions are sketchy, consider London, where police teamed up with YouTube to suppress hundreds of drill videos from being seen at all.

Drill music is a Chicago-born creative output of inner-city Black youths defined by real-life experiences and perspectives, including gang-related conflict and anti-establishment narratives. A British subgenre, U.K. drill, first sprang up in the South London district of Brixton around 2012.

London’s Metropolitan Police, or the Met, claim drill music has helped fuel a rise in knife crime across the city, and have sought to remove drill music from online platforms based on the mistaken — and frankly, racist — belief that it is not creative expression but a witness statement to criminal activity.

Governments across the world have a long history of scapegoating Black music for society’s problems. Jazz and blues were targeted in the 1910s and 1920s; several U.S. cities banned rock-and-roll shows in 1958 after an alleged riot broke out following Chuck Berry’s set at the Big Beat show, with one newspaper decrying those “raucous, undulating rhythms that teen-agers call cool.” The racism became more overt with the advent of gangsta rap, which is among drill music’s influential antecedents.

It was bad enough when the Met launched Operation Domain in 2015 to monitor “videos that incite violence.” But things got worse when YouTube in 2018 started an “enhanced partnership” with the Met, which has since facilitated a pervasive system of content moderation for drill rappers in the U.K.

In 2019, Operation Domain was replaced by Project Alpha, which involves police officers from gang units operating a database of 34 different categories, including drill music videos, and monitoring sites for intelligence about criminal activity. Vice reported that 1,006 rap videos have been included on the database since 2020 and a heavily redacted Met document notes that Project Alpha aimed to carry out “systematic monitoring or profiling on a large scale,” with men aged between 15 to 21 the primary focus.

The Daily News Flash

Weekdays

Catch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon.

YouTube’s partnership with London’s police includes giving Project Alpha officers “trusted flagger” status to “achieve a more effective and efficient process for the removal of online content.” The Met has called this “a global first for law enforcement” — a distinction of dubious merit outside of dictatorships. Drill lyrics can include graphic threats of violence. Yet law enforcement’s history of linking music to violence displays “street illiteracy.” Police assume it depicts real-life actions rather than an artistic expression communicated through culturally specific language that police are seldom equipped to decode.

When sites cooperate with government agencies in such content moderation systems, the platform is inherently biased in favor of the government’s positions and gives law enforcement outsized influence to control public dialogue, suppress dissent and blunt social movements. It also pressures platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.

It’s hard to get a handle on the numbers, but Project Alpha clearly has an impact. The BBC reported that the Met made 579 referrals for removal of “potentially harmful content” from social media platforms since November 2016; 522 of those were complied with, predominantly from YouTube. Vice reported that the Met referred 510 music videos to YouTube for removal in 2021 and the platform removed 96.7% of them. Meanwhile, popular YouTube channels have advised artists to censor content that could be deemed offensive to avoid potential removal once the video goes live.

The Met denies that Project Alpha suppresses freedom of expression, but the collaboration with YouTube has facilitated a punitive system of censorship that contravenes data protection, privacy, and free expression rights. And this certainly seems to be what Adams envisioned when he urged social media earlier this year to ban drill music.

It’s telling that YouTube and the Met, so far as anyone knows, have not consulted experts in music, sociology or other fields to balance input provided by police. Regardless, social media platforms like YouTube should take more effective voluntary actions against partnering with law enforcement and should ensure that all individuals can share content online without their voices being censored by government authorities.

Whether or not drill music glorifies a violent lifestyle isn’t the issue. Art might reflect violence, but it doesn’t cause violence. If you’re offended by drill music, don’t listen to it. But beware of letting any government censor any art form, because the next one censored — the next song silenced, the next video erased, the next book banned or burned — might be your own.

Collings is senior speech and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.