Mayor Eric Adams on Friday urged social media firms to ban “drill” rap videos that glorify and promote violence.
The mayor’s plea came a day after he gave an emotional speech about the life and death of 18-year-old drill rapper Jayquan McKenley, aka Chii Wvttz, who was gunned down in Bedford-Stuyvesant last Sunday.
Adams said he was not familiar with drill rapping — which tends to have dark, violent themes, often including killing with semiautomatic weapons — until he spoke to his son, Jordan Coleman, who works at Jay-Z’s Roc-Nation.
“I had no idea what drill rapping was. My son sent me videos. It was alarming,” he said.
Adams said he wants to meet with social media companies and tell them to take drill rap videos off their platforms.
“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” he said.
Adams said it would be irresponsible to continue to give violent rap music videos a platform after Twitter banned former President Donald Trump for posting what it deemed as objectionable and inflammatory content.
“We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites,” he said following an unrelated press conference.
“We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam.”
Adams also said will meet with some of the top hip hop artists to talk about the violence promoted by drill rapping, which is “causing the loss of lives of young people like them.”
Facebook/Instagram and Twitter had no immediate comment.
Adams’ campaign against drill rapping comes ahead of his lobbying trip to Albany next week, where he will urge Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislators to support his plan to curb gun violence. He is facing resistance from some fellow Democrats in his bid to toughen the state’s controversial bail law and prosecute gun-wielding teenagers who are now exempt from being charged in criminal court.
He also plans on meeting with civil rights activists — including Al Sharpton and state NAACP president Hazel Dukes among others — about his crime-fighting agenda.
