At the tail end of March, over two years after being given the boot from Twitch, Adin Ross was suddenly unbanned. This came as a surprise to many viewers – and not a pleasant one.
Ross’ first tenure on the platform came to an end in early 2023, not long after he began cozying up to the likes of professional misogynist and assault/trafficking allegations magnet Andrew Tate. Things did not seem on track to improve, with Rolling Stone writing a couple months after Ross’ Twitch suspension that he platformed an anonymous neo-Nazi on Kick. As recently as October of 2024, he platformed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who proceeded to engage in Holocaust denial during the broadcast, as he is wont to do. Ross was also accused of Nazi saluting some fans earlier this year, which is the same year he swore he’d turn over a new leaf, at least in regard to chat moderation.
"I feel defeated tryna even repair things or explain stuff because there’s no explaining,” Ross said on Twitter after the Nazi salute clip, originally from earlier this year, went viral in March. “I’m pictured the way I’m pictured and it sucks, sorry to everyone I have failed."
It is not difficult to imagine why Twitch employees, like Twitch viewers, were upset that Ross has been permitted to return to his old, significantly more visible stomping grounds. After all, his recent actions do not exactly scream “reformed.” During a Twitch all-hands meeting that took place last week, of which Aftermath has viewed video, one employee voiced their incredulity to Twitch CEO Dan Clancy.
"What evidence did you evaluate that Adin Ross had reformed enough since his ban to justify him being unbanned?” the employee asked. “To be transparent, this is one of the decisions we've made that I've disagreed with the most. I strongly believe that this opens the wider community to harm and sends a signal that we will allow the sort of vitriol Adin has been known to perpetuate."
Clancy largely replied in platitudes and rules-speak, which we’ll get to in a second. But the last part of his response is the most interesting, so let’s start there:
“I can say this emphatically to everyone: This is [in] no way, shape, or form based upon any business considerations whatsoever,” Clancy said during the meeting. “This isn't even remotely related to a business. It's about deciding about when you can give someone a second chance – and then giving them a chance, but if they don't live up to our expectations, we can take action. So in terms of this opening the wider community to harm, I think that if he doesn't live up to our community guidelines, then he won't still be on Twitch."
This line of thought is worth scrutinizing, because it’s unlikely that having Adin Ross and his army of disaffected boys back in town is bad for business. Indeed, it could even prove beneficial for Twitch in the long run if the company – and Ross – play their cards right. For one, Ross is undoubtedly a needle mover; his 2024 Kick stream with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, a masterclass in the art of shameless suck-uppery, peaked at over 580,000 concurrent viewers. For two, the far-right grift is in right now all across the internet, even on Twitch, where Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt’s daily missives decrying DEI and Democrats have installed him as the new politics king over deposed leftist himbo sensation Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker. Hate is against Twitch’s community guidelines – unless you know how to word it correctly.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Ross has crossover appeal; one of the biggest creators advocating for his return from exile was Kai Cenat, livestreaming’s biggest star of the past few years and a bonafide real celebrity at this point (though I guess now the two are maybe beefing over the notion that Cenat didn’t try hard enough to help him get unbanned? I don’t know, man; it’s beside the point). Ross is also buds with manosphere-adjacent luminaries like Jake Paul and UFC president Dana White. Basically, he’s a terrible, irritating link in a lot of lucrative chains.
If you were Clancy, the head of a company that everybody knows isn’t profitable – and that remains in thrall to Jeff Bezos, one of history’s most bottom-line-obsessed overlords – and you were not being disingenuous about your purpose, which is always to make decisions motivated first and foremost by business considerations, you could do quite a bit worse than this.
The remainder of Clancy’s explanation reiterated his philosophy on the idea of indefinite bans, which he’s outlined elsewhere and which he does seem to really believe in, at least insofar as it allows him to be nominally friendly with everyone regardless of ideological bent.
“Adin's been banned for over two years,” Clancy said. “He was banned for having a certain number of strikes on his account rather than a singular offense that [led to] indefinite suspension. It's important to note these suspensions are indefinite, not permanent. They've always been thought of as indefinite. Many organizations use indefinite suspensions. In basketball, Draymond Green was indefinitely suspended from the NBA and then let back on.”
On Clancy’s watch, Twitch has been allowing indefinite suspensions – and the black marks on streamers’ records left behind by prior suspensions – to expire. Outside of a few select “high severity harms” like violent content and youth safety, indefinitely suspended streamers can apply to have their accounts reinstated after six months. Clancy said that Ross passed the test.
“We have a team that looks into this, and it is always a challenging line. We do believe that it's important for people to be able to change the way they have behaved in the past. I think that's a critical component, and we try to assess the likelihood that you will behave consistent with our guidelines,” he said. “In this case, Adin has made a number of public statements about trying to change where he's been. We've gotten feedback from various people about him trying to change. As always with this, we will see how it works out.”
Clancy added that Ross will find himself under extra scrutiny for the time being and that he’s looking at fewer potential strikes before he’s out again.
“In general, for those who are unaware, when people come back from suspensions such as this, we also hold them to a fairly high standard,” Clancy said. “It's not like they start off from ground zero. The severity of any enforcement actions or otherwise might be more severe given where we're at.”
