Six years ago, almost to the date, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds while he called for his mother. Today, an Instagram account called GeorgeDroidAI has more than 80,000 followers and depicts him as a cyborg powered by what the account calls a “fentanyl reactor.” Instagram has done nothing about it.
Americans have been making money off Black death for as long as there has been an American market. Lynching postcards, which historian Amy Louise Wood has documented extensively, were sold openly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mailed between family members, displayed in shop windows. The corpse was the product. The terror was the appeal.
GeorgeDroidAI is doing the same work with new tools. The account takes a man who was murdered on camera, strips him of the dignity of being a victim, reassembles him as a science fiction joke, and sells the engagement back to advertisers through Instagram's monetization systems. Eighty thousand followers is not a niche audience. It is a small city of people being trained, daily, to see Floyd as something other than a human being who died.
Here’s how we can end this ..
That's why I'm partnering with Change.org to demand Instagram moderate this content. The precedent is already there. CurbstompMFG, an account named after an act of neo-Nazi violence, was removed after sustained reporting from the ADL and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Last year I documented racist AI videos pulling tens of millions of views on the platform, posts that looked nearly identical to what GeorgeDroidAI is producing now. Meta knows how to act when it decides the reputational math has shifted. The petition is one way to shift it.
The petition is one way to move the cost calculation. Reporting the account is another. Refusing to treat this as a fringe curiosity, when it is in fact the latest expression of one of the oldest industries in American life, is the most important. The technology is new. The business model is not.
George Floyd was a real person. He had a mother he called for. He had a daughter who said her daddy changed the world. Six years later, an algorithm is changing him back into a punchline, and the company hosting it is counting the clicks.
