Is Ye, the Chicago-born artist formerly known as Kanye West, the future of Twitter?
Over the weekend the always-publicity-hungry rapper tweeted a now-deleted antisemitic comment that has triggered yet another new debate over who gets to decide what goes on the internet.
Ye’s Instagram post Friday suggested fellow artist-producer Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jewish people, a tired old antisemitic trope that never seems to go away.
Within hours, Instagram had removed the post and locked his account, which sent Ye to Twitter, where he was welcomed back by no less than Elon Musk, who may soon take ownership of the company.
Yet, within hours Ye had posted an even more hostile antisemitic tweet that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” (The caps are his, along with his apparent misspelling of “DEFCON,” a Pentagon acronym for Defense Ready Condition, an indicator of levels of threats facing the country.)
Twitter, like Instagram, was quick to block the post and lock his account as a predictable chorus of self-appointed guardians of free speech howled in online complaints that poor little Ye was being censored unfairly.
Let ’em gripe, I say. If anything else, Ye is being censored quite fairly, based on traditional readings of the First Amendment.
As the late, great journalist A.J. Liebling put it most famously and succinctly in The New Yorker in 1960, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Indeed, freedom of the press cuts both ways too. Owners of media, big and small, reserve the right to decide what’s acceptable on their pages or websites. Otherwise, one is advised to own their own medium, as the former tweeter-in-chief and Ye hero, Donald Trump, did in launching Truth Social.
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Is he having trouble building an audience as big as his formerly beloved Twitter? Hey, the First Amendment guarantees you a right to publish. You have to build an audience on your own — and not everyone rushes to find a social network that has turned into a garbage pile of grievance.
But, of course, the question is never quite settled, especially in today’s Twitterverse.
While today’s polarized Congress has tackled the topic with lots of words but not much real action, new battles are boiling up in the states over laws seeking to restrict the moderation of content,
And there’s the feisty Musk, whose release of Ye from what critics call “Twitter jail” demonstrates his intent to loosen the Silicon Valley giant’s policies that still block Trump.
For example, a law passed by Texas last year prohibits large online platforms from censoring users or limiting their posts based on the political views they express.
Legal experts say such laws could make moderation of even blatantly antisemitic posts such as Ye’s or other forms of “hate speech” a riskier proposition for social media companies or even impossible.
That’s the problem with trying to draw the line on acceptable speech or writings before anyone has said or written it, two rights which the First Amendment was enacted to protect.
As of yet, Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa where I reported in the mid-1970s, still seems to have difficulty understanding the nuances of how this free speech and free press thing works.
“If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so,” he tweeted in May, “otherwise it should be allowed.”
Nope, it’s not quite that easy. Actually, it is not the law that has driven major social media to moderate content. It’s the market. Social media developed constraints for their content because of money and the market.
A bigger mystery is why Kanye — forgive me, Ye — has taken such a turn into the dark abyss of antisemitism. He seems to enjoy stirring unnecessary passions, such as his recent decision to wear a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris Fashion Week.
He’s hardly the first artist to go to extremes, merely to shake up public sensibilities. But there’s a difference between self-promotion and self-destruction. Speculation is rampant, based on his own disclosures of past bouts with bipolar disorder.
But as psychologists point out, mental illness and bigotry are separate problems that call for distinctly different responses. They call for cures, not encouragement.
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