Twitter owner Elon Musk said during a Twitter Spaces on Saturday that it was his decision to suspend rapper Kanye West from Twitter after he posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David.
"Because at a certain point, you have to say what is incitement to violence," Musk said, as quoted by Axios. "Because that is against the law in the US, you can't just have a 'let's go murder someone club,' that's not actually legal."
"It is important people know, okay, that was my decision," Musk added, before noting that the context surrounding West’s tweet helped him make the suspension decision.
"You can say like, okay, let's look for added context outside of Twitter to say, well, what's this meant in a friendly way? Well, ok, no, he's saying that he likes Hitler and other things," Musk said.
West’s latest suspension from Twitter came after he made antisemitic remarks during an interview with Alex Jones of Infowars. In that interview, the rapper said he “loves everyone,” including Jews, as well as Nazis, spoke favorably of Hitler and denied the Holocaust.
His Twitter account was suspended by Twitter’s previous leadership after he threatened to go "death con 3 on the Jews" in an antisemitic rant on the social media site. West followed this up by claiming that he can't be antisemitic "because black people are actually Jew."
Musk reinstated West’s account shortly after he took over Twitter.