Rap Genius, the popular music website, made its name by allowing users and community members to annotate their favorite songs, books, and speeches. However, this innovative interactive interface landed one of its co-founder in some serious trouble, following the Santa Barbara shooting.

The shooter, Elliot Roger, sent an email, with his 137 page manifesto attached, to key friends and family members before going on a deadly rampage; when it was all said and done, six were killed and 13 others were injured. As things often do in today’s media and internetcentric society, the long diatribe leaked online. Rap Genius posted the entire piece on their website, which gave users access to annotate and dissect the demented man’s words.

While a lot of users and members normally leave sarcastic or ironic notes, being so close after the spree had ended left many online with bad tastes in their mouths. Leading the pack of vocal authors looking to crack a joke, was Rap Genius’ co-founder Mahbod Moghadam. He made left a number of insensitive annotations and made light of the overall situation.

Today, Rap Genius has announced that they have let Moghadam go from the company. Citing his poor judgement and distasteful remarks as some of the main reason for the departure. They also acknowledged the lack of insight their annotative version of the 137 manifesto provides, and are hoping to get it up to snuff soon. Upper Management released a press statement dealing with this issue that can be read here, and you can check out some excerpts below.

The current version of the annotated document is far from great, but the hope is that the annotations will improve over time as the story unfolds and it will eventually be a good resource for people looking to understand this tragedy.

Almost all the annotations were at least attempting a close reading – they were genuinely, though imperfectly, trying to add context to the text and make it easier to understand.

However, Mahbod Moghadam, one of my co-founders, annotated the piece with annotations that not only didn’t attempt to enhance anyone’s understanding of the text, but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny. All of which is contrary to everything we’re trying to accomplish at Rap Genius.

Were Mahbod’s annotations posted by a new Rap Genius user, it would be up to our community leaders, who set the tone of the site and our approach to annotation, to delete them and explain to the new user why they were unacceptable.

Were Mahbod’s annotations posted by a Rap Genius moderator, that person would cease to be an effective community leader and would have to step down.

Jimi (@Nativejimi)