Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll end the show with a question and your calls about, especially if you were there, what the heck was that all about in Union Square last Friday? As you may know, thousands of people gathered, and some of them rioted after the very popular social media influencer, Kai Cenat, who has millions of followers had promoted online that he would be giving away free stuff in Union Square like PS5 gaming devices, PlayStations. It wasn't a concert, and it wasn't a protest or any kind of political event. Here is Cenat promoting the giveaway on Twitch last Wednesday.

Kai Cenat: 14th Street, Union Square Park, NYC starting at four o'clock depending on how rowdy you getting like that. Four o'clock is starting on Friday. What date is that chat? Friday the 4th, right? Is that the 4th? Friday, bro. Now look, it is a public area so we don't know, anything can happen, bro. Anything can happen. Make sure you put up with somebody. Just make sure you put up with a friend so y’all make sure y’all good and like that. I call this the Stay off the Streets and Go Swing Project.

Brian Lehrer: All right, that was Kai Cenat on Wednesday. By the end of the day Friday, a bunch of people got hurt. More than 60 people got arrested, including Kai Cenat himself who wound up being charged last I read with a misdemeanor version of inciting a riot and a few other things. As in any case where a massive police response meets a crowd of largely young Black males, people are asking, as they should, if the police made things better or the police made things worse. With me now to try to answer the question, what the heck happened in Union Square last Friday is Jay Peters, news editor at The Verge. Jay, thanks for coming onto with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Jay Peters: Thanks, it's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: For the uninitiated, who is Kai Cenat, and what's his content usually like?

Jay Peters: Kai Cenat, you kind of talked about it, he's most well known as a big Twitch streamer. Twitch being the platform where people most often stream themselves playing video games, but in recent years has blended into people live streaming themselves doing things out in the world, just hanging out in their house, maybe doing cooking shows. He has more than six million followers on the platform and he's grown huge followings on other platforms as well. Like he posts YouTube videos to an audience of four million subscribers, he has more than seven million followers on TikTok. He just uses social media to share what's going on in his life and posts entertaining things for his fans to follow.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an example of Kai Cenat interacting with a fan on Twitch.

Kai Cenat: Yeah?

Fan: Yeah. Yo Kai, we met before bro. what’s good?

Kai Cenat: What?

Fan: We met before bro.

Kai Cenat: Where?

Fan: Right over here. It was like right over here.

Kai Cenat: Oh, you miss me [unintelligible 00:03:20]?

Fan: Yeah, I miss you, bro.

Kai Cenat: Damn bruh, so like what you want to do today, bro?

Fan: Can I show you my piano skills?

Kai Cenat: Yes.

Fan: All right, look.

[music]

Kai Cenat: Oh, snap.

Brian Lehrer: Oh snap. That's sweet. Here's an example of him also on Twitch interacting with Drake, who it seems like just called in while he was live streaming the video game NBA Live. Listen.

Kai Cenat: Oh, that’s Drake?

Drake: Yo.

Kai Cenat: Yo.

Drake: What's up my boy?

Kai Cenat: Yo, what's good? What's the word?

21 Savage: Hey, we streaming bro.

Drake: Tell them to drop some 21s in the chat.

Kai Cenat: Yo, drop some 21s ones in the chat y’all. Drake in the mother f*ing building, y’all. Drake in the building, y’all. Yes, sir. Yo bro, when you got to come on stream, bro?

Drake: You may have to set it up. Maybe 21 could set it up for me. I’mma have to pop through to-- I know where you're at so I might have to pull up on you. I might have to just-- you know?

Kai Cenat: I bet you'll pull up bro. I ain’t going lie bro, you should pull up, for real, for real.

Brian Lehrer: And there you go, so Kai Cenat and Drake. If Drake is calling him up, he's obviously big. Now listeners, any Kai Cenat fans listening right now and want to say why you follow him? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Anyone who went to the Union Square event on purpose for the giveaway or just to see Kai in person, tell us why you went and how that turned out for you and the chaos and anyone else who just got caught up in it. Also, any police officers who were deployed there, welcome to call in. What the heck happened to Union Square last Friday? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Jay, who do his followers tend to be?

Jay Peters: His followers tend to be younger people. The voice of the person you aired first, I would represent as probably the typical Kai Cenat person who follows his streams or follows his content online. You can see why he is an entertaining person to follow. He clearly brings a lot of energy to when he's talking to people, whether it's just somebody who says they met him one time or when he's talking to Drake, one of the biggest music superstars in the whole world. You can see that across his Twitch streams, his TikTok videos, his YouTube videos, and it ultimately just makes him a really entertaining person to follow.

Brian Lehrer: When we call him an influencer, what does that mean? Is it mostly sponsored content paid for by advertisers?

Jay Peters: Influencer to me means yes, they can influence people's buying decisions in terms of recommending certain products based on sponsorships, but I also think of it as a broader way to think about people who are just making content online for really large follower bases. A word I use a little bit more often is probably creator, which is also vague in its own way just as influencer is. But at the end of the day, a lot of these social media superstars, they're making videos or they're posting things online and they're just creating this work that people can respond, react to, share, and talk about with their friends.

Brian Lehrer: Did he really have hundreds of PS5s and other things to give away at Union Square on Friday?

Jay Peters: I don't think we know to the extent of exactly how much he had to give away. My understanding is there's at least some gift cards shown in a brief video before he went out briefly with the public during this gathering. I don't think it's clear if anybody actually got anything from this giveaway. It seemed like things got out of hand so quickly that he needed to be removed from the scene and it doesn't seem like the giveaway may have actually happened.

Brian Lehrer: How did it get violent and what was the violence about?

Jay Peters: I think it was just the huge numbers of people and it's these huge numbers of fans who not only want maybe the chance to get a PS5 or a gaming PC, which if you're a young teenager that is following Kai Cenat, that might be something you really want to have that's financially out of reach. I also think it's more that it's the opportunity to see this person that you watch videos about all the time, who you think you could be friends with, or you want to be friends with. The chance to see this person in real life in New York City where you might live and hang out every single day, I think for a lot of people, that was a opportunity they wanted to try and be a part of. Then it got out of hand when there were so many people and they're all vying to maybe see Kai Cenat or the group he was traveling with and things spiraled out of control.

Brian Lehrer: Seeing Kai Cenat is one thing, throwing construction materials, firecrackers at each other, and then also at police is another.

Jay Peters: Oh, yes. I don't think he encouraged any of this stuff. All the stuff that I've seen, he's wasn't telling people to get out of hand like this. I'm not exactly sure where that maybe more rioty mentality started, but we've seen these sorts of groups that get out of hand with social media influencers in the past. When these groups of sometimes thousands of people, of young people come together very suddenly to see these social media superstars, that things can just evolve very, very fast.

Brian Lehrer: Kanini in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kanini. Thanks for calling today.

Kanini: Hi, good morning. Thank you so much. I watched the entire event live on Channel Four without a commercial break for over an hour and a half, which is unprecedented. I'm a former high school teacher. I used to be the director of history at Harlem Children’s Zone so I think the world needs to think about the lens of a high school boy, right? In terms of the NYPD,- -it took, what, 41 minutes for them to assemble and actually-- because they were severely outnumbered. It’s just like, why would that happen? I'm also an activist, and all of my friends tell me that as soon as they tweet out or they say, "Yo, we're going to meet up to protest against Jordan Neely, or to protest against police brutality," the cops are there. The cops are there to beat them up and to basically disorient them so they gain no momentum in terms of holding police or government officials accountable.

Brian Lehrer: Well, the police would certainly deny that they go there to beat people up, but in this case, it wasn't a protest. It wasn't a political event of any kind. It wasn't a protest, right?

Kanini: I know. If you let me finish.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Kanini: Like I was going to-- yes. When you think about what the purview of NYPD is, and I didn't say that they specifically-- that's what actually does happen. I get tons of videos and text messages from the activists. What I'm also saying is that the purview of the NYPD right now looks at activists and looks at terrorists. They're not looking at a social media influencer with over 5 million followers. In that vacuum of the NYPD not focusing their purview or their resources on that-- and they said that they knew about it from one o'clock, but yet you also in this vacuum have gutted the budget in terms of after-school programs, summer school programs, mentorship.

I just went to Harlem at the Rucker, amazing event. Hundreds of people were there to sit there and cheer on this huge basketball tournament. That should be happening every week or every day, every night. In that vacuum where in American culture we don't have actual rites of passage, we don't have actual deities that other societies have had to look up to, to sit there and say, "This is the light. This is the way. This is how you live your life." If you don't have other programs funded, what you're going to have is a bunch of children with nothing else to do. You have an entire generation of youth that are used to using their cell phones as the primary way to communicate.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you on all these underlying conditions, Kanini, really interesting and a level deeper. Do you have an impression of the police response, whether it was appropriate or inappropriate in any way?

Kanini: Oh, you mean in terms of what NYPD did?

Brian Lehrer: On Friday.

Kanini: Yes, I think it's the tip of the iceberg at that point. I think all the contaminant issues just like comorbidities with COVID, I think at the top of the food chain, hey. I do think that Kai-- I follow him as well, this whole movement of NPC, which is what he's a part of in video game culture. I think if you're going to be proactive with other movements like terrorism and activists, just be proactive with the way that you handle the youth.

I think that by the time it got out of hand, it just was demoralizing on all fronts. It was demoralizing for even I think the sergeant who did the press conference. It was demoralizing for some of the children, but a lot of these children-- again, it was live. They interviewed them and they were like, "What do you think," and they're like, "Wow." They're like, "It's dangerous," and they're like, "Yes, I'm going back because when else am I going to find somebody famous?" You're really looking at youth--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I saw that same clip. Kanini, thank you. Thank you for all of that. Lou on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lou.

Lou: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I am not cuckoo over the NYPD. I'm not a big fan of them, but for this lady to come and try to blame the NYPD, it's not fair to them. These men and women do a hard job. The responsible thing, the adult thing to have done was for this guy to call somebody in the Public Affairs Department of the NYPD, explain to them what he was going to do, then the police will have to help you for crowd control.

As you're talking about teenagers, are these teenagers from a zoo? Are they from outer space? Where are the parents? Why don't we instruct our children before they go out into those kind of places in the street so that they are better behaved? You can't just put everything on other people. We parents have to take responsibility for our children, instruct them, tell them how to behave in public, the same way they're supposed to behave in the classroom.

Brian Lehrer: Lou, thank you very much. Jay, let me turn back to you. You heard those couple of calls. Are there any police brutality charges being made by advocates or crowd members in this case?

Jay Peters: Not that I'm aware of yet. I read in a New York Times article this morning that there's some investigation to some of the police response. There's a video that was going around social media of a kid who appeared to not be actively doing anything wrong being taken by police and their head smashed against a car window. Honestly, it feels very violent and challenging to watch, but as far as I know, there have not been any formal charges brought against the police.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Megan in SoHo, you're on WNYC. Hi, Megan.

Megan: Hi. Hey, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, your 15-year-old son went. Is that what you told our screener?

Megan: He went. I think all these kids, they just went to get the PS5s. I don't think any of them, or I don't know, went to start a riot, but there were just way too many teenagers there. There were way too many people in Union Square. He went and he right away realized it was just way too crowded, and he left, and texted me, and he said, "Stay home, stay safe." I could hear helicopters from down on Houston and Lafayette.

Brian Lehrer: Megan, thank you very much. How much trouble is Kai Cenat in now, Jay? We see incitement to riot and we think of Donald Trump and January 6th, but this is a misdemeanor incitement to riot. I don't see anything that indicates that Kai Cenat intended to cause a riot, but we heard in the clip when he was inviting people to Union Square on Twitch, he did anticipate it could get rowdy. I guess he should have at least coordinated with the NYPD or gotten some kind of permit if he expected a crowd of thousands.

Jay Peters: In retrospect, he definitely should have coordinated with the NYPD in some way. I believe in one of the press conferences, the NYPD said they wished that it happened as well. Like you said, there's the misdemeanor charges that I believe he's going to a hearing later this month for that, but in terms of-- I'm not sure if he's in much more trouble beyond that. What I have found is interesting is he hasn't posted very much on his social media networks since then. I've only seen one video on a secondary YouTube channel since all of this happened.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe he feels like he got in a little over his head compared to what he expected. 15 seconds, do you think this is a one-off, or is this indicative of a thing that somehow the city needs to protect against in the future, the violent aspects? 15 seconds.

Jay Peters: I don't think it's a one-off. Just the huge popularity of many social media superstars means they can summon thousands of people to appear in a certain spot with almost little notice. I would expect we are going to see incidents like this at some point in the future in any city in the world just based on how big some of these social media stars are.

Brian Lehrer: Jay Peters, news editor at The Verge on what the heck really happened at Union Square last Friday. Jay, thanks so much.

Jay Peters: Thanks for having me Brian.

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