In the wake of drag racers terrorizing the people of Chicago by speeding through its streets and intersections — with one such event resulting in the death of a 40-year-old woman who was visiting the city –, They escalated further by assaulting Chicago police officers with bricks and rocks as Lori Lightfoot, the Mayor of Chicago, jumps up to target social media for the behavior of these people.
This past Sunday, 40-year-old Shawman Meireis was moving through the crosswalk next to Midway Airport just the day prior to her birthday when she was struck by one of the speeding drag racers. She was later pronounced dead in Oak Lawn at the Advocate Christ Medical Center. Additionally that same day out in the Pilsen area, “an angry crowd attacked police with bricks, a road sign, a tree and rocks as a police vehicle drove toward the crowd,” reported The Chicago Tribune.
While all of this was taking place, Mayor Lightfoot chose to take the time to try and blame social media for the event taking place, snapping, “Their failure to be proactive in addressing these issues to work proactively with law enforcement is an absolute abomination.”
Lightfoot was questioned, as part of a Monday press conference, “What roles do the TikToks and the Instagrams that are posting all these videos do? These [drag races] are clear violations of the law. If these [videos] are taken down because people are watching them, then what’s the attraction of them? It’s diminished, right? Should the police department be working with them to try to take these things down?”
“You’re trying to trigger me, aren’t you?” answered Lightfoot, going further, “I’m being somewhat facetious.”
Then she went off on another of her tirades against social media companies: “I think the lack of responsibility on the part of social media companies, who absolutely know exactly the kind of things that are being posted, their failure to be proactive in addressing these issues to work proactively with law enforcement is an absolute abomination.”
Lightfoot took the chance to call for wholesale federal intervention to apply censorship to social media, claiming, “I’m one who believes that the federal government has to step up and regulate every single one of these platforms, whether it’s selling guns on social media, brazenly and openly, and nothing’s being done about it. Whether it’s this kind of thing, advertising things that clearly threaten public safety, whether it’s violence against women, whether it’s child pornography, there is a whole marketplace of illegal activity that is going on every single day on social media.”
“And these social media companies absolutely have the ability to regulate what’s happening on their platforms,” she went on. “This isn’t a question of First Amendment rights; this is a question of public safety for our kids and for our communities, and if these social media companies continue to frankly, stiff-arm us and not own their responsibility, it’s gonna be an even worse problem.”
“Many of the things we see with young people ending in gunfire and violence, you know where they start? The start on social media,” she exclaimed.
