Everytime Ye has said something that has gotten him in hot waters, it has ultimately died down in the face of a new album rollout or the release of another apparel collection. Kanye loves the drama and he is not afraid to speak his mind, no matter what the consequences might bare. At this point, even the common public knows that Kanye likes to create controversy just for the sake of relevance, only the thing is that he keeps somehow succeeding despite having followed the same game plan of getting drunk in his own bravado for years now. That being said, this time things might finally be a little different. Ye, right after ending his long-running partnership with Adidas in the most public way possible, returned to Twitter in an unexpected way. Ye was banned from Instagram after a slew of posts that directly targeted a whole bunch of people, so he took to Twitter to express his resentment. Unfortunately, the post that followed has had him stuck in a huge predicament ever since. Kanye made an insensitive tweet claiming to go “death con 3 (Defcon 3) on Jews“, reigniting the old anti-semitic notion of Jews controlling the media. Ironically enough, this statement caused the biggest backlash for Kanye in recent memory, arguably more so than even his comments on slavery and his support for Trump with the infamous MAGA hat.
Ye is acquiring Parler
Speaking of Trump, within that era of American politics, a bunch of right-wing-leaning social media platforms championing conservatism started emerging. These apps were positioning themselves as a more lenient alternative to the status quo of Twitter and the likes. The most famous one out of all these platforms was Parler, and now Kanye West is buying it. Announced in a press release issued by Parlement Technologies, the parent company of Parler, Kanye West has officially entered in an agreement to acquire the “uncancelable free speech platform“. While the details of the deal are under wraps, Parler’s cloud services and data center infrastructure are expected to be included in the agreement. Parler prides itself in the fact that it does not moderate its platform as strictly as more ad-friendly apps need to. Earlier last year, Parler was removed from both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store after claims that the Capitol storming plans were brewed there. That should give you an idea of the kind of freedom a platform like Parler grants to its users. Mr. West has had more and more right-wing sentiments as of late, going as far as to wear a “White Lives Matter” shirt at his Yeezy Season 9 show whilst calling the Black Lives Matter movement “a scam.” Critics have linked this back to his 2018 remarks over slavery being a choice and how Kanye, being a prominent Black man himself, always looks out for white validation. So, it only makes sense that after being banned by essentially every social media platform for discriminatory and highly-controversial statements, Kanye would just make—or in this case—buy his own platform, aka Parler. After all, Kanye is a billionaire with a reported net worth of over $2 billion USD, so he can certainly afford it.
High ambitions
Interestingly enough, Elon Musk‘s initial reasoning to buy Twitter were somewhat similar. He wanted the platform to loosen up its content moderation policies in order to elicit more free speech. Buying the platform would allow Musk to implement these changes and perhaps even reinstate the accounts of figures like Donald Trump and, now, Kanye West as a result. Kanye and Elon are good friends behind the scenes and Mr. Musk has cited Kanye as his primary inspiration in an interview before. Despite both personalities having their fair share of fans and critics alike, it seems that they both have quite the visions to build out their own version of the world. For Kanye West, though, this will be yet another uphill battle with the mainstream media even if he is well-intentioned. Whether this is more of an impulse decision or a true stride to build an “uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome”, remains to be seen. As someone who is a fan of the art, it is heartbreaking to see the man who was once unanimously called a genius perpetually spiral more and more into the deep end. Here’s hoping there is a silver lining at the end of all this.
