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Rap Genius founder resigns after annotating Santa Barbara killer’s ‘manifesto’

By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 27 May 2014

One of the co-founders of Rap Genius resigned from the company yesterday after criticism of posts he made to the lyrics site in the wake of the multiple killings that occurred near the University Of Santa Barbara on Friday.

The offending posts occurred within the News Genius forum which allows users to post, annotate and comment on documents relating to current events, in much the same way users post, annotate and comment on song lyrics in the main section of the Rap Genius platform. The document the site’s co-founder Mahbod Moghadam annotated was the “manifesto” of Elliot Rodger, the young man behind Friday’s homicides.

Some have questioned whether it was right at all to dissect Rodger’s writings so soon after his crimes had been committed, though the site’s owners have argued that doing so falls within the remit of the News Genius forum and that perhaps “understanding the psychology of people who do horrible things can help us to better understand our society and ourselves”.

However, it wasn’t Moghadam’s participation in this particular Rap Genius post that caused controversy, rather some of the things he wrote, in particular remarks that some of Rodger’s somewhat sinister manifesto was “beautifully written”, and even more so an assumption that the killer’s sister must have been “smokin hot”.

As criticism of the annotations grew online the Rap Genius founder told Valleywag: “I was fascinated by the fact that a text was associated with such a heartbreaking crime, especially since Elliot is talking about my neighbourhood growing up. I got carried away with making the annotations and making any comment about his sister was in horrible taste, thankfully the Rap Genius community edits out my poor judgement, I am very sorry for writing it”.

But the apology seemingly wasn’t enough to placate the flood of critics that had by this point emerged online, leading to an announcement by another founder of the site, Tom Lehman, that Moghadam had stepped down from the company.

In his own post Lehman defended the discussion of Rodger’s text on his site, but conceded that had one of his community’s moderators posted the same remarks as his co-founder, that moderator would likely be asked to step down. “And Mahbod, our original community leader, is no exception” he went on. “In light of this, Mahbod has resigned – both in his capacity as an employee of the company, and as a member of our board of directors, effective immediately”.

Lehman added: “Mahbod is my friend. He’s a brilliant, creative, complicated person with a ton of love in his heart. Without Mahbod Rap Genius would not exist, and I am grateful for all he has done to help Rap Genius succeed. But I cannot let him compromise the Rap Genius mission – a mission that remains almost as delicate and inchoate as it was when we three founders decided to devote our lives to it almost five years ago”.

The venture capital backed Rap Genius previously courted controversy for operating without licences from the music publishers whose lyrics its core service utilises, and then for seemingly breaking Google’s rules for encouraging bloggers to link to its pages, resulting in a temporary ban from the web giant’s search lists. Though the Google slip up was quickly fixed, and deals with most of the US music publishers have now been negotiated.

The site’s operators and backers will be hoping that, with Mahbod’s speedy departure, this slip up can be as quickly put behind them.