- Meta removed multiple clips of a UK drill rapper's music video on its platforms earlier this year.
- Law enforcement flagged the content to Meta, saying it could potentially cause a safety risk.
Meta removed multiple clips of a UK drill rapper's music video from its platforms after the company received takedown requests from law enforcement, according to a new report that argues platforms like Meta need to have more transparency about its relationship with state authority. Meta took the videos down without telling the uploaders that law enforcement asked for them to be removed.
The report, published this month by the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), refers to a case involving videos removed by Meta in January 2022. The company took down clips of the UK drill rapper Chinx (OS)'s music video "Secrets Not Safe" after they were flagged by UK law enforcement, which told Meta that parts of the video "could contribute to a risk of offline harm," according to a summary on the Meta-funded Oversight Board, which reviews content-moderation cases and asks for comments.
The rap subgenre "drill" is one of the genre's most globally popular styles, with numerous national offshoots like UK drill, Balkan drill, Russian drill, and French drill. Drill typically features aggressive lyrics and references to guns and violence, and some of its practitioners have ties to street gangs.
Experts at Meta, which knew the song made reference to a past shooting, "escalated the review," according to the summary, and eventually took down the content for breaking the platform's Violence and Incitement rule. The summary says Meta's Public Policy team thought the song could serve as a "threatening call" and "increase the risk of potential retaliatory gang violence."
But soon after the content was struck down, the uploader appealed the ban, and a human reviewer said it didn't break Meta's rules and reinstated it, according to the summary. Yet the content was removed again after another takedown request from law enforcement came a little over a week later, and Meta also "took down other instances of the video found on its platforms," the summary states.
A crackdown on drill music brings fears of censorship
The CDT's report described the way law enforcement is using platforms' Terms of Service to flag content as "part of a growing arsenal state authorities use to pursue content removal from online services." Since platforms' rules can include more content restrictions than national laws allow, this method of getting content removed "threatens the ability for users to express themselves free from illegitimate government interference," argues the report, which says law enforcement flags can place "significant pressure on social media companies" to act on them.
"Typically, when law enforcement wants to get content taken down, it would have to go to a court and convince the court that the content was unlawful and get a court order," Samir Jain, a Policy Director at CDT, told Insider. "The concern is that basically law enforcement bypasses what would typically be the legal requirements for obtaining lawful process."
To improve the process, the CDT recommends in its report that Meta distinguishes between and discloses situations where content flagged by law enforcement is eventually taken down because of local law and because of the platform's Terms of Service. The report also says users should be told if a government actor requests their content be removed, and how they can appeal the decision.
"There's a real risk to free expression more broadly, because you can imagine the government using Terms of Service violations as a pretext to try to get providers to take down government criticism or speech that the government doesn't like," Jain said. "Providers are in a tough position when you've got law enforcement requesting that information be taken down and asserting that it's unlawful."
Meta did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Drill has been one of the most criminalized music forms in the last decade, with a constant moral panic swirling around some of the scene's biggest stars. Chief Keef, a pioneer of drill in the early 2010s in Chicago, where the sound first exploded, had shows canceled by authorities. The late leader of the Brooklyn drill scene, Pop Smoke, faced similar pushback from local police. Before this removal incident, YouTube removed at least 130 drill music videos after London police asked the platform to, and the Metropolitan Police told Insider that it was tracking over 2,000 drill videos.
The New York Police Department has also focused on drill music, and is widely reported to for years have operated an unofficial unit dedicated towards monitoring hip-hop scenes called the Enterprise Operations Unit.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams suggested earlier this year that drill music videos should be pulled off social media and compared them to Trump tweets. He quickly backpedaled days later during a summit with some popular drill rappers.