There has long been speculation thatTwitchgives special treatment to certain popular streamers, the big money earners on the platform, by not enforcing the terms of service even when they’ve clearly been violated. This idea essentially became accepted as fact whenstreamer Alinity was not banned from Twitcheven after treating her cat in a way that many viewers considered abuse on more than one occasion.
The supposition that Twitch streamers with the largest audiences are not held to the same standards as other content creators has also been reinforced by the platform doling out bans that many consider little more than a slap on the wrist. For example, whenAmouranth was banned for licking the microphonewhile angling her bum at the camera, she was only suspended from Twitch for three days. And while she’s been banned multiple times for sexual content, it’s always for a negligible period of time and seemingly without long-term consequences for repeated violations.
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On October 6, an anonymous person claimed to havehacked Twitch and uploaded a 125 GB fileto 4chan, which contained a wealth of content like source code, streamer payout receipts, and encrypted passwords. While the majority of the information contained in the file has been revealed by now, some tidbits are still coming out, including a list that purports to be a do-not-ban list of certain content creators.
First posted onTwitch streamer Asmongold’s subreddit, the list contains the names of streamers followed by a reason why the person should not be banned. A couple of names in the document, like ricegum and loltyler1, have been given the reason: “Do not suspend; escalate violations to [redacted]@twitch.tv.” At a glance, the list does seem to confirm that selected Twitch streamers are exempted from being immediately banned for terms of service violations, with instructions to instead forward the cases to specific Twitch staff members.
A number of other names also appear on the list, which seems to be a snippet of a larger document. For example, the name “djwheat” has a reason listed as “underage.”Twitchcontent creator djWHEAT used to play games on stream with his son, miniWHEAT. Some people have interpreted the “underage” flag to mean that, if djWHEAT’s stream ever gets reported for having an underage child onscreen, moderators are to ignore the report because it has already been investigated and given a green light. If this interpretation is true, then it would mean that the list includes the names of content creators who should not be banned for the provided reasons, including Tyler1 and RiceGum, who are apparently not to be suspended at all by regular moderators.
