Twitter has come under fire from many including the Home Secretary following their delay in taking down anti-Semitic material posted by grime artist Wiley.
Priti Patel said the comments made by the singer were anti-Semitic and “abhorrent.” She went on to say she is asking “for a full explanation” from social media companies as to why the posts were left up for over twelve hours.
Wiley, whose real name is Richard Cowie, is seen as the architect of the grime genre and has also been named the “godfather of grime.” He posted messages on social media which compared Jews to the Ku Klux Klan, also calling Jews “slippery.” He carried on by saying the Jewish community should “hold corn”, a term meaning “to be shot” in slang.
Wiley has just under a million followers on both Twitter and Instagram together.
The police are currently investigating the posts to see whether a crime has been committed. He has also been temporarily banned from both Twitter and Instagram.
Wiley’s manager Mr Woolf, who is himself Jewish, said he had “cut all ties” with the London-born rapper and that there was “no place in society for anti-Semitism”.
Mrs Patel wrote on Twitter:
“The antisemitic posts from Wiley are abhorrent.
They should not have been able to remain on Twitter and Instagram for so long and I have asked them for a full explanation.
Social media companies must act much faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms.[1]”
Facebook, the company that owns Instagram, said that there was “no place for hate speech on Instagram”.
As a response to Twitter and Instagram’s inactivity in taking down the posts, there was a move by Jewish groups, actors and politicians to boycott the site for forty-eight hours beginning on Monday morning at 9am. The boycott has been championed by musicians Jessie Ware and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, as well as actors Tracy Ann Oberman and Jason Issacs.
[1] https://twitter.com/pritipatel/status/1287353007852716032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
