The artist formerly known as Kanye West has just been censored on two platforms that have been purported to be all about non-censorship.
From HuffPost:
Both Twitter and far-right social media platform Parler on Friday censored an “N-word” comment from Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
Parler, which allows just about anything, blotted out Ye’s comment on its Apple app, where it would have likely been taken down eventually by Apple, The Daily Beast was the first to report.
“Apple prohibits this content on IOS Apps. View it on Parler for Web,” read the Parler notice.
The comment — in which the rapper wrote that he was “starting to think” that the term “antisemitic” is a coded way of using the N-Word — remained on the Parler website late Friday.
Soooo, a few things:
First, Parler, the platform Ye agreed to buy not long ago, is basically white nationalist PornHub. Who knows what its racial slur policy is, but it seems the whole reason the platform was created was so right-wingers could gather and be as provocative, offensive and bigoted as they want to be without having their “free speech” interrupted.
Then there’s Twitter, which exploded in an unholy baptism of racial slurs and otherwise bigoted language immediately following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform.
One might easily get the idea that these social media sites are suddenly cracking down on n-word usage when it’s being used by Black people in a non-racist context. (Not that I support Ye’s argument. Like, bro—you’re not being called antisemitic because you’re Black. You literally tweeted “death con 3 to Jewish People.” It’s like a Black person saying, “gardener is the new n-word” while holding a pruner and smelling like fresh roses. Calm down.)
On a side note, just last week, Musk tweet-whined about Twitter experiencing a “massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.”
He basically accused activists of “trying to destroy free speech” by—*checks notes*—using free speech.
So, maybe Ye’s post got taken down because content moderators flag certain words regardless of context. Or maybe these platforms are generally selective when it comes to what they consider to be “free speech.”
What do y’all think?