After Kanye West Super Bowl Ad Promoting Website Selling Swastika T-Shirts, Online Store Is Taken Down By Shopify – Update

deadline.com:

UPDATED with take-down of e-commerce site. An e-commerce website that was promoted by Kanye West via a stealth Super Bowl ad and later sold swastika T-shirts has been taken down by Shopify for violating the company’s terms of service. “Something went wrong,” read a message on Yeezy.com on Tuesday. “The store is unavailable.” On Monday, after a low-tech ad featuring West plugging the site aired on four local Fox stations (including three owned by Fox Corp.), the site featured a single product: a $20 white T-shirt bearing a large, black swastika.

The move coincided with a spree of antisemitic statements by West, whose account on X also went dark. The outbursts came a bit more than two years after Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas was canceled, along with a recording contract and other deals due to West’s increasingly bizarre public embrace of hate speech.

Sources familiar with the local ad buy said Fox and Nexstar, owner of one of the stations, each subjected the ad to legal vetting, but at the time the site was offering more conventional merchandise.

The swastika shirts started to be offered only on Monday. Shopify issued a statement to Deadline on Tuesday explaining the company’s handling of the situation. “All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform,” the statement said. “This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify.” The Ottowa, Canada-based Shopify also reported fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday morning.