Twitch’s Banning Problem
Twitch bans are nothing new to the streaming community, with dozens of streamers a day getting banned for often inconsistent reasons.
That inconsistency is starting to hit a peak, however, as recent events have started to show a clear bias in Twitch’s policies.
Playing Bouncer with Twitch Bans
Back in March, much-beloved streamer Pokimane faced allegations of racism after it appeared, she had casually dropped a racially charged term on stream.
While initially facing heavy community outrage over her comments, slowing the play down and taking it into context one can clearly hear her say “Anivia,” one of the champions in her League of Legends match.
Twitch decided that made sense and decided not to punish her.
Normally something like this wouldn’t be worth reporting on, but just a short month later in April a similar incident happened with another popular League of Legends streamer, TFBlade, who faced similar accusations after viewers mistook him saying “idiot” for something again more racially charged. TF’s got a rather heavy accent, so mishearing what he said isn’t uncommon.
This time, however, the mishearing got his account banned for 30 days, a horrible amount of time for someone who makes their entire living off streaming and collecting donations from fans.
Many in the gaming community came out to support TF, including Team Liquid CEO Steve Arhancet, who stepped in to clarify what he himself heard.
Even though it was eventually proven he’d just said “idiot,” Twitch still only reduced his ban to 7-days, claiming that their staff had all heard him drop the n-word in the clip.
And now we’ve got another racial case on our hand, with streamer Amouranth dropping a surprise n-word when discussing ethnic food.
While we’d generally give people the doubt (especially with accents), you can very clearly, in this case, hear her drop the n-word with a very hard “r.”
Despite the evidence in this case, Twitch has still yet to ban or even punish her, letting her get off scot-free.
With how fast the ban against TFBlade was, it’s shocking that nothing has been done about Amourath yet and indicates an underlying level of bias at the company.
Given the already existing controversy surrounding Alinity throwing her cat, many male streamers have begun to question Twitch’s apparent favoritism and unwillingness to ban female streamers with large followings.
Rumors circulated when Ninja left for Mixer that the unfair ban policy of Twitch was part of the reason for his leaving, and others have since begun looking for alternative streaming options themselves.
The bleed-off of big named streamers will likely continue until something is done about situational Twitch bans and some kind of standardization is enforced.
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