Spotify, SoundCloud and other tech platforms have worked to remove a new song from Ye that praises Adolf Hitler, but the song and its video have continued to proliferate online including across X, where it has racked up millions of views.
On various mainstream and alternative tech platforms this week, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been able to share his latest song, titled “Heil Hitler,” along with its companion title, “WW3,” which similarly glorifies Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust.
While some platforms have taken steps to attempt to pull down the song, others have seemingly let it spread freely.
The continued spread of the song and the varying approaches to moderation exemplify an increasingly fractured environment online and on social media, where some platforms have pulled back on their moderation practices in recent years, while others have tried to maintain higher standards when it comes to hate speech.
Elon Musk’s X is where the song has found its biggest audience.
On Thursday, Ye uploaded a video for the song on X, where it remained up as of Friday evening and received more than 6.5 million views. At least 12,000 users and a handful of right-wing influencers quickly shared the clip on their pages. Ye’s most recent repost is of a video mixing historical clips of Hitler together with his song as a backing track. He also shared a video on X of influencer Andrew Tate — a self-described misogynist — playing the song in his car. That video has been viewed over 3 million times.
Ye’s account is verified as an organization on X, meaning it could be eligible for monetization and ads. It’s not clear if Ye’s account uses those features.
The proliferation of the song, despite its invocation of Hitler, is the latest illustration of the power that social media platforms have handed over to some highly followed celebrities and influencers, and their inability or unwillingness to control the spread of some content after it’s been published. While Ye did not appear to attempt to upload the song to other social media platforms, other people have reposted the video.
On Facebook, NBC News found over a dozen reuploads of the “Heil Hitler” music video, and on YouTube half a dozen reuploads of the song that had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. On TikTok, a handful of reuploads had been posted using the hashtag #hh.
X, Meta, TikTok and YouTube all have hate speech or hateful conduct policies that generally forbid speech targeting a specific group for their race, or hateful invocations of genocide. X and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. A YouTube spokesperson said, “We removed the content and will continue to take down reuploads,” noting that accounts associated with Ye are ineligible for monetization.
Ye was briefly able to upload the song to the popular music streaming services Spotify and SoundCloud.
The presence of the song on Spotify prompted a petition campaign from the Anti-Defamation League calling for its removal.
In a statement, Daniel Kelley, director of strategy and operations at the ADL, said: “Spotify has been mostly radio silent to outreach from ADL for the majority of 2025, so we felt it was important to activate our volunteer base to pressure them to act on the platform’s stated policies.”
Kelley said Spotify didn’t respond to their outreach, but appears to have removed the song. “WW3,” which contains lyrics glorifying Nazis, is still up on the platform.
But some users have circumvented Spotify’s removal of the song, uploading it to Spotify’s podcast section or uploading re-recorded cover versions of the song.
SoundCloud appeared to remove versions of the song linked to by Ye on his X account, but NBC News located 27 reuploads or remixed versions of the song on the platform.
Spotify and SoundCloud did not respond to requests for comment.
On Friday, Ye posted on X that he had found a new music streaming hub for his song called Scrybe — linking to a website with links to download pages for the app on Google’s and Apple’s app stores. The small music streaming app bills itself as catering to indie musicians, with the tagline, “More Money for the Artist, Less Money for the Fan.”
On the app, Ye’s songs are all labeled as trending. Scrybe did not respond to a request for comment.
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