Twitter hasn't decided if Ye's exile from the platform is permanent, new safety chief says
- Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was booted off of Twitter after posting Nazi iconography.
- Twitter's new safety chief told The Wall Street Journal that Ye's return to the platform is uncertain.
Twitter's leadership isn't sure whether or not they'll allow Ye, who used to go by Kanye West, back onto the site after he tweeted an image containing a swastika.
The social media platform's head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told The Wall Street Journal that she couldn't guarantee Ye's return to the site, saying, "I don't know that we know the answer to that yet."
Irwin also suggested that decisions around content moderation were being made on the fly, telling the paper that the company is "biasing towards moving quickly and figuring out the details in some of these areas after."
Ye was suspended this month after tweeting a hybrid symbol of the swastika and the Star of David.
At the time, Musk said that he decided to kick Ye off the site and shared text messages in which he told Ye, "you have gone too far. This is not love."
Twitter's suspension of Ye follows months of the rapper-designer pushing the boundaries of the kinds of hate speech allowed on social media. He had previously tweeted a string of anti-semitic comments, including, in early October, an apparent threat that he would be "going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE."
That resulted in Twitter removing the tweets and temporarily locking his account. Six weeks later, he was back on and received a warm welcome from new owner Elon Musk, who has made a brand of courting some of the more volatile elements on the site.
"Don't kill what ye hate. Save what ye love," Musk tweeted.
Representatives for Yeezy did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday morning.
Musk's tumultuous takeover of Twitter, after months of speculation about whether he would back out of the deal, has been marked by the layoffs of thousands of employees and the departures of high-level officials, including its former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth.
The notion of policing speech on the platform has vexed Musk, who at one point indicated plans to enlist a "content moderation council" to advise on decisions.
Despite that proclamation, Musk brought back former President Donald Trump onto the platform after conducting a Twitter poll, rather than consulting such a council. Twitter had banned Trump's account last year after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in which Trump supporters barraged the US Capitol.
Of late, Musk appears to have embraced the Twitter poll approach, deploying a similar one to decide on the fates of other suspended users.