Kanye West’s Super Bowl commercial led to a debate on tech platforms drawing the line between freedom of speech and hate.
Before the Super Bowl, Ye formerly known as Kanye West, spent the week prior unleashing a wave of tweets centered around the Jewish community. He declared things like “I am a Nazi” and “I love Hitler.”
Dr. Matthew Brittingham, an adjunct history instructor at UMKC, said that public figures with a following, like Ye, promoting this kind of content can be very damaging.
“There is definitely a relationship between public figures exploiting this rhetoric and violence,” says Dr. Brittingham. “You don’t have things like the A Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh without a lot of folks who went before espousing a lot of rhetoric.”
Ye ran his advertisement in the Los Angeles area Sunday night of the Super Bowl. The commercial starts with Ye laying down in what appears to be a dental office chair.
He claims he spent the entire commercial budget on a new set of teeth. The 30-second commercial, filmed on an iPhone, ended with the URL for the Yeezy website flashing across the screen. Up until the ad ran, the Yeezy website showed a store selection of non-branded clothing.
Within the hour of the ad running, Ye switched the website’s content. Upon arrival to the website, users saw one singular white T-shirt with a black swastika labeled HH-01.
It has since been revealed the store was taken down due to the risk of fraud. General counsel for Shopify Jess Hertz said that although the shirt was inexcusable, opinion didn’t factor here and what mattered was their terms of service.
In Shopify’s Acceptable Use Policy, it states that the merchant can not call for or threaten violence against specific groups of people. Technically, Kanye’s merchandise did not violate these terms listed. Joss Quick, a freshman, said that it’s a bit of a grey area.
“It really is hard to say,” says Quick. “I understand that his shirt didn’t technically violate the terms of service listed, but it’s still wrong. It’s difficult to understand where companies are drawing the line when it comes to those types of things.”
As of now, Kanye West has been banned from Shopify, but many are still outraged with his decisions.
“He’s been in the limelight for years with his controversies,” said Quick. “I’m not sure why people keep allowing him the platform to do so.”
abtxz@umsystem.edu
