Kanye West and the Limits of Free Speech Online
I’ve spent years working at some of the world’s largest social media platforms. I’ve seen how the right kind of moderation can improve conversations, and how the wrong kind — or none at all — can produce chaos, spread hate and spill into real-world violence.
When I started in this field, the trust and safety teams I led had a simple premise: People should be able to express themselves so long as they do not put others in danger. Over time, though, I came to appreciate the complexity of defining danger in a digital environment with billions of users.
The difficulty of this work was on stark display when the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, posted a stream of misogynistic and antisemitic invective to his more than 30 million followers on the platform formerly known as Twitter, which now goes by X. In a dayslong spree recently, he posted uncensored clips from pornographic movies, denigrated women and Jews, posted photos of swastikas, named specific Jewish executives who he believed were sabotaging his career and said, “Slavery was a choice.”
My search of archived versions of Ye’s now-deleted posts suggests that only the post naming specific executives was flagged with a warning by X for potentially violating its hate-speech policies. Vilifying Jews individually and collectively and deploying the symbol of the regime that murdered six million Jews — using swastikas is expressly cited by X as an example of hateful imagery — seems to have gone unaddressed. That’s typical of what we’ve seen at Elon Musk’s X, which has shifted away from proactive enforcement of policies against hate, meaning sometimes intervening before content even becomes public or reducing the number of people who see it, and toward Community Notes, a crowdsourced system that empowers certain X users by adding context in the form of a label after the fact.
Meta, which owns Facebook, has also recently scaled back its interventions and is ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States. Some cheer these moves as a return to freer speech. But what remains is the question of whether Ye’s speech should be broadcast via any platform’s algorithm. Where is the line between the right to speech and the right to reach?
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that no moderation system is perfect. I’ve sat in rooms where we have debated where to draw the line, knowing that to catch most harmful content we would also inadvertently remove innocent posts. Moderators can be unsure whether a satirical post crosses the line into hate speech or if a post expressing earnest concern about vaccine efficacy has veered into misinformation. There is no universal consensus on what constitutes “harm,” and without careful calibration of policies and the machine-learning models trained to enforce them, mistakes happen.