Kanye West's Yeezy Website falls offline after Shopify stops taking orders for swastika T-shirts

Shopify, an e-commerce site, has removed an online store belonging to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, for selling T-shirts with a swastika.

"All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms, so we removed them from Shopify," the company said in a statement.

Ye, the musician previously known as Kanye West, used a Super Bowl advertisement Sunday night to drive visitors to his website, which had recently begun selling white T-shirts with a black swastika, the emblem of Nazi Germany and a well recognized sign of antisemitic hatred.

For the past few days, West has been spewing virulently antisemitic, homophobic, and sexist hate speech to his almost 32 million followers on his X account. Celebrities, Jewish groups, anti-hate organizations, and other X accounts have urged with Elon Musk's X platform to take action, despite Musk's own controversial conduct and Holocaust-related statements.

Some of West's X postings were restricted in their exposure, including those with homophobic remarks and another inciting for violence against Jews. A remark appended to a few posts stated. “This post may violate X’s rules against hateful conduct,” adding that the post “can’t be replied to, shared or liked.”

On Sunday evening, West seemed to delete his own account. “I’m logging out of Twitter. I appreciate Elon for allowing me to vent, It has been very cathartic to use the world as a sounding board,” he posted.

Ye previously had a lucrative collaboration with Adidas, which cut ties with his Yeezy brand after the musician made a series of anti-Semitic statements. 

Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that a variety of websites and businesses use to sell products. The firm did not specify which of its policies the site broke, but its terms of service stipulate that it will act "to restrict products or activities that we deem unsafe, inappropriate, or offensive."