During TwitchCon 2024’s opening ceremony, the streaming service announced upcoming changes and advancements to its ban policy—namely that it would be making it more clear what constitutes a violation of the platform’s terms of service. According to Twitch, these changes “seek to improve clarity about our enforcements and reduce the risk that streamers lose their livelihood for low severity infractions.” But that doesn’t mean that intentional, repeat offenders will be able to weasel their way back onto the platform, as the company “will continue to issue suspensions, including indefinite suspensions for high severity infractions.”
Though Twitch has been the dominant video game and variety streaming platform since its inception in 2011, several platforms (like YouTube, Rumble, Kick, and even TikTok) have since cropped up in direct response to it, with some billing themselves as a sort of anti-Twitch, a place where content creators seeking fewer restrictions on their conduct can go to be, in many cases, as openly hateful as they want. Conservative personalities like Steven Crowder, The Quartering, and Melonie Mac regularly stream on Rumble, a platform that claims it is “immune to cancel culture.”
But Mac also still streams on Twitch, where she’s been banned roughly seven times, the most recent of which appears to be because she said a homophobic slur during a Bible-reading stream. “This has become a monthly routine at this point, I think it’s hilarious,” she posted on X (formerly Twitter) after her September 5 ban. She was later reinstated on the platform.
Twitch streamer Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff, who also regularly streams on Kick, was banned from Twitch in June after using a transphobic slur. When he later returned to Twitch, Kolcheff claimed he didn’t know the slur was derogatory, saying, “they were saying it’s like the fucking n-word, I didn’t fucking know that.” A year prior, the controversial streamer had a skin modeled on him pulled from Call of Duty after he made an anti-LGBTQ comment on Twitter.
In a follow-up email to Twitch, I ask about someone knowingly breaking the terms of service, and the company’s policy for reinstating (or not reinstating) them on the platform.
“We don’t comment on specific channels for privacy reasons. What we can say is that we enforce our Community Guidelines when we identify violations of our rules, and that those rules apply to everyone,” a representative for Twitch replied.
“I think we use accidental nudity as an example where we may be overly punitive towards people,” Kristen Murdock, senior director of global risk and strategy at Twitch says. “When we think about hateful conduct, harassment, sexual harassment, are we actually under-enforcing or are we maybe not being as punitive as we should be to people? And so that is one of the policies that we’re looking through and making sure we ask, ‘hey, where is the line here?’”
In the aforementioned follow-up email, I asked about Murdock’s suggestions that the platform may not be punitive enough when it comes to hateful conduct or sexual harassment. A Twitch rep offered this statement: “We want to make clear that there’s no place for hateful conduct on Twitch. That’s one of the reasons why we’re introducing escalating strike consequences—to prevent repeated violations of our rules, and to reinforce what positive online citizenry looks like. Breaking the same rule over and over may result in a longer or indefinite suspension.”
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