Twitter said Sunday it had locked out the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, of his account, a move that came shortly after he had also been restricted by Instagram.
The artist has 31.4 Twitter million followers, making his feed one of the top 100 most popular in the world.
Ye on Friday posted a screenshot to Instagram of a text exchange he said he had with Sean “Diddy” Combs, with the caption “Jesus is Jew.” The Instagram post has since been deleted from Ye's account.
The message from Ye appeared to show him saying that Combs was controlled by Jewish people, a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
In one antisemitic post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long Ye would be kept off Twitter. The company’s policy states that “enforcement action can range from 12 hours to 7 days, depending on the nature of the violation.”
“The account in question has been locked due to a violation of Twitter’s policies," Twitter spokesperson Fiona Daly said in statement to NBC News on Sunday.
When asked to elaborate on the suspension-earning violation, Daly said Monday: "We’ve nothing to share beyond the statement."
Ye had been off the platform for a long time, with no tweets posted between Nov. 4, 2020 and this past weekend.
He appeared to use Twitter to complain about being taken off Instagram, posting a picture of him seemingly singing karaoke alongside Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Meta Platforms, which owns Instagram.
That drew the attention of the platform’s potential new owner, Elon Musk.
"Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!" Musk tweeted at Ye.
A rep for Ye could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday.
Ye appeared in a Fox News interview Thursday with Tucker Carlson and echoed antisemitic conspiracy theories. In the interview, Ye accused Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, of having brokered Israeli treaties for monetary gain.
Also, at a fashion show last week, Ye sported a T-shirt that read "White Lives Matter," in apparent mockery of the Black Lives Matter movement.
"White Lives Matter" is a "white supremacist phrase" that's popular with the Aryan Renaissance Society, the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
