Afer his unhinged and seemingly interminable anti-Semitic rant, the rapper Wiley has been dropped by his management and is being investigated by the police. As if that weren’t enough, his tweets have provoked renewed calls for tighter regulation of speech on social media.
Home secretary Priti Patel has demanded an explanation from Twitter and Instagram as to why they took so long to remove Wiley’s posts. ‘Social-media companies must act faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms’, she said. For Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Jo Stevens, Twitter and Instagram’s ‘failure to tackle these high-profile examples of hate speech’ apparently ‘shows why we so desperately need proper legislation to force the social-media companies to keep people safe online’.
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