Twitch’s Politburo

One man’s banter is another man’s hate speech. Talking smack at your opponents is part and parcel of the competitive nature of video games. But Twitch, hypersensitive to a fault, would consider harmless banter to be toxic behavior in need of policing. Let alone opinions, which gamers - outspoken in their nature - are very much expected to have.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned online streaming service, has implemented a new set of rules that threaten to ban users for behavior that happens off the platform - and it’s entirely politically motivated. It’s doing so right as it effectively segregates the community by hundreds of different identifying labels that divide creators by race, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, disability, and mental health conditions. 

Despite years of complaints about the behavior of certain popular livestreamers, who’ve been credibly accused of rape, grooming minors, and sexual harassment, Twitch has waited until now to implement a policy of policing users’ behavior outside the platform.

Citing its ban of former President Donald Trump over fears that he could use the platform to incite violence inJanuary, as an example of how it holds its users accountable, Twitchannounced in April that it would be expanding its list of behavioral rules to more properly regulate the behavior of its users off-site.

Without providing evidence, the company claims that minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community are “disproportionately” affected by harassment and is effectively holding content creators’ livelihoods hostage unless they behave in ways permitted by Twitch. 

At face value, the updated set of rules seems fair enough - threats of violence, child grooming, and sexual harassment are bannable offenses. And yet, how Twitch chooses to interpret these violations does not instill confidence. Twitch previously rushed to the defense of one of its partners, a person whoidentifies as a “deer-kin”, after the partner, who is a member of Twitch’s Safety Advisory Council threatened to ban gamers for being straight, white, and male.

Naturally, the gaming community responded by condemning the partner and asking the company to keep its workers in line. Twitch, in all its wisdom,condemned the response as “harassment” of a member of the LGBTQ community, effectively politicizing the situation.

Twitch’s refusal to take responsibility for the actions of one of its more overzealous employees ought to terrify its thousands of influencers, who now find their livelihoods at the mercy of someone who identifies as a wild animal. Toe the political line, or else.

The enforcement of its off-site policy means that Twitch can effectively dictate the politics of its users, who are already afraid to be “canceled” for expressing themselves. Not only can you lose your friends for being a Trump supporter, but you’ll also now not be allowed a platform to livestream yourself playing video games for the very same reason. After all, Twitch banned Trump for “inciting violence” - or more accurately, for simply having the potential to do so.

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” Lavrentiy Beria infamously said. The quote holds true for Twitch, which now operates on a policy of banning people for what they might “potentially” do, and not what they’ve done.

Furthermore, Twitch’s interpretations of what constitutes harassment leave much to be desired, especially in the wake of past enforcement. Members of the community have been banned for misgendering other people (and even video game characters) by accident, or by simplymaking statements like “there are only two genders.” In all these instances, users were banned for expressing their personal beliefs, which Twitch finds offensive.

Much like its parent company Amazon, Twitch banks on woke capital - even to the chagrin of its more progressive users. The company was forced to backtrack from referring to women as “womxn” as part of its Women’s History Month celebrations. Twitch claimed it adopted the term to be more “gender-neutral” in its language, much like its adoption of the nonsensical word “Latinx” to refer to Latinos and Latinas. 

In the case of Hispanic Heritage Month in 2020, Twitch dealt with controversy after it added a series of emote modifiers that allowed users to decorate their emojis with Mexican sombreros, which some users found to be unrepresentative of the Hispanic community at large, or even a form of cultural appropriation. The outrage prompted the company to issue an apology for its misstep. 

Last July, Twitch posted a video montage of streamers expressing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement but pulled it soon after - not because the movement is effectively a form of racial essentialism, but because people pointed out the video was “overwhelmingly white,” with only one line spoken by a Black streamer. 

More lately, Twitch’s efforts to appear woke culminated not in more consistent moderation policies or more active employees, as is demanded by the community, but by removing the term “blind playthrough” after a pro-disability organization complained about how it sounded “ableist.” All this while the company effectively creates a soft porn category called “Pools, Hot Tubs and Beaches” available to users of all ages. 

This week, Twitch will add 350 tags to bolster diversity and inclusion on the platform relating to race, gender, sexual orientation, mental health, nationality, and other identifiers - effectively promoting segregation. It won’t be long before Twitch fully adopts Critical Race Theory and forces the ideology onto the platform and its user base. 

As a social media platform, Twitch is no longer interested in upholding the right to free speech or allowing its users to freely express themselves and has instead appointed itself moral guardian and gatekeeper of the video gaming community with a twisted sense of morality, understood only by the woke progressives who run it.

You can follow Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter @stillgray.