Will Katcher
masslive.com
Twitter chief executive Elon Musk suspended Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, from his social media platform early Friday, hours after the rapper tweeted an image of an interconnected Star of David and swastika, which Musk said incited violence and constituted a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.
Ye has been widely castigated as antisemitic in recent weeks over his comments concerning Jewish people, which earned him a suspension from Instagram and cost him as much as $1.5 billion in a lost apparel deal with Adidas.
On Thursday, he appeared on the podcast of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and praised Adolf Hitler. His face covered fully in a black mask, Ye declared: “I like Hitler.”
“I love Jewish people,” he also said. “But I also love Nazis.”
Ye’s suspension stemmed from a photo he tweeted later Thursday, of a swastika inside a Jewish Star of David.
“He again violated our rule against incitement to violence,” Musk tweeted around 12 a.m. Friday. “Account will be suspended.”
Ye was suspended from Twitter in October for a post that said he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale, DEFCON. Twitter later lifted the suspension. Musk, who bought the company in a $44 billion deal soon after, told NBC News he was not involved in the decision to allow the rapper to return to the platform.
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