Kanye West’s Twitter has taken a real turn in recent weeks. A turn into musings on “freedom of thought” and “existing consciousness” and endorsements of right-wing personalities like Candace Owens and Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Today, it took another turn when West tweeted … well, what exactly is this?
So, uh, what exactly is going on here? Great question. The answer is that this is a screenshot of West’s bookmarks in Apple’s Safari browser. To answer your follow-up question: Yes, he appears to have bookmarked Google searches for a bunch of female political commentators. It gets weirder!
First, you’ll note that only the search for Angela Rye, a liberal commentator and CEO of a D.C.-based political advocacy firm, has a favicon (the little G icon next to Rye’s name), while the rest of them show the standard bookmark icon. There are many reasons this could be the case — for example, maybe he imported this extremely bizarre set of bookmarks from another browser.
I’ll just note that when I tested this on my own computer in Safari, favicons appeared next to my bookmarked Google searches only after I’d clicked on them from my list of bookmarks. Meaning, West may have bookmarked these Google searches, but never actually clicked through to them from the bookmark menu.
The first eight bookmarks are all women. Rye, actress Amanda Seales, California senator Kamala Harris, conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, activist and co-chair of the Women’s March Tamika Mallory, activist and fellow Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour, activist and Women’s March co-chair Carmen Perez, and Fox News host Ebony Williams. You couldn’t find women with more disparate opinions if you tried. (And I’m guessing Kanye was trying.)
The final bookmark is the only one that appears not to be a Google search for just a name. Our best guess is that it’s this video, a lengthy debate between Christopher Hitchens and William Dembski from 2010 about the existence of god. The video’s title, “Does God Exist,” seems like a good fit for the truncated bookmark in West’s tweet.
That last one, the bookmarked video, is also the only bookmark that actually does what a bookmark is meant to do. The video is over an hour long. Maybe West wanted to watch it in 15-minute increments. Maybe he wanted to be able to double back and watch it a second, third, and fourth time. How handy to have that link saved! Given that the information that surfaces each time you Google someone’s name is liable to change, there’s really no point in bookmarking a search for their name. Those eight names are just for show. They’re basically a list. West could have written them down in his Notes app, posted a screenshot, and achieved a similar effect — a thing celebrities love to do.
