By: Daniel Yao
Have you heard about the chaos that happened in New York City during the PlayStation 5 giveaway event? Thousands of people surrounded a place and caused injuries and dozens of arrests. The influencer Kai Cenat is facing multiple charges, including inciting a riot.
On Friday at 4 p.m. By 1:30 p.m., about 300 people were gathered for Kai’s giveaway. A post to Cenat’s Instagram broadcasted a giveaway at Union Square Park. Jeffrey Maddrey, the New York Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, said at a news conference on Friday “something we would expect for a social media event like this.” But by 3 p.m., news of the giveaway had spread widely online, and thousands of people began arriving in Union Square.
Seconds later, Cenat got out of a vehicle and was immediately swarmed by fans. The stream cut out shortly after Cenat’s bodyguards began pushing people away from him.
Eventually, the police removed Cenat from the park, Maddrey said, “for safety reasons.” The event had not been coordinated with the police, the police chief added.
Maddrey said people in the park threw paint cans, bottles, and rocks, while others walked around with shovels, axes, and other tools from nearby construction sites.
The police arrested 65 people, including 30 juveniles, he stated. Two police officers and four civilians were taken to the hospital in ambulances, while another officer suffered minor injuries. But Maddrey warned people that the number of injured people would rise.
“I saw other people leaving here with their heads split open, you know, cuts, bruises, lacerations,” Maddrey said, also adding that he also had been hit on the head”.
Maddrey exclaimed the incident showed the power of social media and what it does to people. “We went from 300 kids to a couple of thousand kids in minutes. We have to be responsible when we use this tool”.
Twitch has banned Cenat several times since 2021 for various infractions, including displaying explicit imagery, threatening other users and streaming while under the influence.
The giveaway was a collaboration with the Bronx YouTube star Fanum, who discovered and inspired Kai Cenat’s career in content creation. Cenat’s fame grew as he streamed with rappers including 21 Savage and Bobby Shmurda. Cenat has earned tens of thousands of dollars a month just for streams of himself sleeping (Hm maybe I could earn money for sleeping).
Cenat has 6.5 million followers on Twitch and holds the record for most monthly subscribers on the platform, with more than 300,000 paying viewers in February. That is more paying subscribers than most U.S. newspapers.
Around 5 in the afternoon, police were dispersing the crowd, and around 6 police had pushed much of the crowd well out of the park.