Elon Musk’s disturbing, burgeoning vision for Twitter was fully visible this weekend after the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla entered the center of a content moderation controversy created by Kanye West, which now goes by Ye.
West appeared on Twitter for the first time since November 2020 on Friday night, tweet “Look at this Mark kicking me off Instagram” with a blurry photo of himself and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg singing karaoke. The company confirmed that The Hollywood Reporter that Instagram has indeed removed content from West’s account and imposed restrictions after repeated policy violations. While West’s account was still visible on Sunday, it has likely been blocked from posting new content temporarily.
West’s recent Instagram posts are all screenshots of lyrics, and the post that broke Instagram’s rules appears to have been a conversation with Sean “Diddy” Combs in which he called out anti-Semitic tropes and accused the other musician of being controlled by “the Jewish people”.
Future Twitter owner Elon Musk quickly dropped in to welcome West back to the platform, despite the troubled artist’s very recent displays of anti-Semitism.
West appears to have interpreted Musk’s warm welcome as a green light, addressing his anti-Semitic conspiracies in a tweet just 12 hours later. “I’m a little sleepy tonight, but if I wake up I’m going to die” [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” West tweeted Saturday night. “… You have been playing with me and trying to blackmail anyone who is against your agenda.”
Despite Musk’s stamp of approval, Twitter deleted the tweet, which invoked anti-Jewish stereotypes often embraced by white supremacists, and locked West’s account “for a violation of Twitter policy,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to londonbusinessblog.com.
Just before causing chaos on Instagram and Twitter, West caused controversy during Paris fashion week and debuted a new line in a pop-up warehouse show featuring a shirt with the phrase “White Lives Matter.” The incident immediately pitted West again much of the fashion industrywho spoke out against him, defending Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, who attacked West for criticizing his stunt as “deeply offensive, violent and dangerous”.