Late last week, Twitch dropped the precise kind of announcement a company tends to save for the tail end of a week: Going forward, it would require streamers to apply a “politics and sensitive social issues” label to broadcasts that include “discussions about elections, civic integrity, war or military conflict, and civil rights,” as well as conversations about “legislation related to a sensitive social issue such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, or immigration.” The latter stipulation proved especially unpopular. Twitch has since clarified a portion of the rules, though streamers continue to feel like they set worrisome precedents.
In the days following Twitch’s announcement on Friday, numerous streamers spoke out against this use of Twitch’s labeling system, which allows viewers to hide content with specific labels – thereby making it less discoverable – and lets brands exclude labeled broadcasts from their ad campaigns. Nearly 40,000 Twitch streamers and viewers upvoted a post on Twitch’s official feedback page urging the company to remove the “sensitive social issue” bullet point from the rules.
“LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and reproductive rights are not ‘sensitive social issues,’ they are common sense issues, where one side simply wants their liberties intact,” read the post from a Twitch user. “The controversy is entirely on the other side of the argument [that] involves taking those liberties away. Especially as it pertains to LGBTQ+ individuals, the notion that the discussion of their very existence is political is absolute nonsense.”
Monday evening, Twitch locked the feedback page post and clarified its rules.
“We want to make clear that you don’t need to label your stream if you’re talking about your lived experience,” Twitch wrote on Twitter. “We’ve also clarified that a label is only required if discussion of the listed topics is the focus of the stream. Our goal here, as with any [content classification label], is to give viewers and brands more info about what’s happening on a particular stream, so that they can make an informed decision about what to watch and where to engage.”
Twitch also published a revised version of the rules with the aforementioned clarifications, as well as a notable removal of the word “immigration.” The new bullet points include slightly more specific language like “streams focused on discussing topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion in a polarizing or inflammatory manner” (emphasis ours).
So, reading between the lines, Twitch’s goal here is to make it easier for brands to avoid politics-focused streamers, just as it once did when it created an entire category for pools, hot tubs, and beaches after advertisers made a fuss about Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa and other hot tub streamers in 2021. Twitch has been unprofitable for quite some time and has made many unpopular changes in pursuit of a stream it arguably considers more important than that of the live variety: revenue. These include a substantial focus on ads, shuttering operations in Korea, and multiple rounds of mass layoffs.
The specific context here is more labyrinthine: In October, Twitch began to face criticism from Israeli media and Israel-friendly content creators as a result of a sign-up snafu in which the company accidentally blocked email verification in Israel and Palestine for a whole year, as well as a TwitchCon panel in which several streamers of Arab descent ranked other creators based on who is allowed to say “habibi,” an Arabic term of endearment – the top tier of which was “Arab” and the bottom tier of which was “Loves Sabra,” an objectively bad brand of hummus from a company with Israeli military ties.
Big names like YouTuber Ethan “H3H3” Klein contended that this constituted open antisemitism, while streamers who participated in the panel – including the tier list’s creator, Raffoulticket, who is Jewish – vehemently denied those accusations. Nonetheless, the Anti-Defamation League, a notorious Israel supporter, got involved, prompting Twitch to suspend Frogan, considered the ringleader of the panel, and the other streamers who participated for 30 days. This after it handed out a two-week suspension to Asmongold following a much more unquestionably-racist rant against Palestinians.
There are some notable ties here: Klein used to regularly podcast with Twitch’s biggest political creator, Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, until the two came to repeated verbal blows over Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Piker has been an outspoken opponent of Israel and – as he has repeatedly stressed during broadcasts – not the Jewish people for years, as a result of what the World Court found to be an apartheid state in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He’s been instrumental in younger generations coming to the conclusion that Israel is responsible for human rights abuses despite years of propaganda linking anti-Israel sentiment to antisemitism – the latter of which is obviously a problem, but not one intrinsically tied to Israel.
Piker, whose streams and videos reach millions of viewers, competing in terms of sheer numbers with traditional news networks, is also partially responsible for politicians like Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taking a shine to Twitch, beginning with an Among Us stream in 2020 that peaked at nearly 500,000 concurrent viewers. This, as well as influencer-centric tactics from the Republican party, has clearly informed the Harris campaign’s approach. In recent months, Harris has launched a Twitch channel, Bernie Sanders has learned what a vtuber is, and AOC and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz have streamed Crazy Taxi to an enthusiastically-receptive audience (which, at various points, spammed Piker emotes in chat). As a result of anti-hate speech rules that are generally better enforced than on other platforms (with some admittedly glaring exceptions), and a more left-leaning audience, Twitch is home to few conservative political influencers of note.
Frogan is Piker’s former moderator and a member of his community, as well as somebody Klein has come after on multiple prior occasions. In the time sense Frogan and her collaborators were suspended following Klein’s period of sustained outrage, Democratic representative Ritchie Torres has taken up the cause, publishing a letter last week expressing “alarm about the amplification of antisemitism on Twitch at the hands of Hasan Piker” and ominously concluding that “no company in America – not even Twitch – is above Congressional oversight.”
Additionally, Digiday published a piece about a creator-led campaign that reached out to over 100 advertisers with evidence of supposed antisemitism on Twitch, including a clip in which Piker claimed that reports of mass rapes committed by members of Hamas on October 7 were never confirmed (Piker was referencing a March 2024 UN report that admitted a lack of forensic evidence of sexual violence; the offending clip is from a stream during which Piker nonetheless argued with a viewer that sexual violence likely occurred – the opposite of what the campaign, as well as others like Torres, have claimed – but also that none of it justifies genocide of Palestinians.)
Not long after Torres spoke up, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy published his own letter saying that "there is no place on Twitch for racism, hatred, or harassment of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia." Now here we are, with Twitch suddenly lurching in a direction akin to other platforms like Instagram, which suppresses content it deems political by default.
Some streamers are concerned that Twitch is caving to external pressure rather than seeking to address real problems.
“I just think [Monday’s update to the politics rules] creates a lot more problems for them than it solves,” Bret "Cinemarxism" Hamilton, a documentarian and streamer who spent time with pro-Palestinian protesters outside of TwitchCon who gathered in response to TwitchCon’s Chevron sponsorship deal, told Aftermath. “Making more rules around it and ‘clarifying’ will always require them to make choices and take stances on what does and doesn’t qualify, and subsequent people outraged by the enforcement or lack of enforcement. I think the previous [terms of service] was really great actually and well enforced. ... They’re capitulating to bad faith actors who aren’t genuinely interested in justice or antiracism; they just don’t like Hasan and want him banned.”
“I think the implementation of a separate category for politics in order to combat antisemitism is a faulty premise. Existence as a minority person, especially in a predominantly white male space, is a political act,” Austin "Gremloe" MacNamara, a leftist politics streamer, told Aftermath. "If Twitch were serious about combating hate speech on the platform, the five banned Arab content creators are a perfect set of people to speak to about it, given that all of them have been begging Twitch to add [Middle East and North Africa] to their Twitch census data to no avail. It's cynical at best and cowardly at worst."
Piker himself is also skeptical of the motivations undergirding the events of the past week, saying to NBC that clips cited by Torres and others as evidence of antisemitism were taken out of context. Piker isn’t entirely sure what to make of Torres’ actions, except that it fits a pattern for the politician, who recently doxxed a college teacher for mentioning “Israeli genocide against Palestinians” during class.
"I think it's a really weird thing for Ritchie Torres, specifically, to try and issue a takedown notice five or six days out from a massively consequential election against a progressive content creator who is the largest progressive voice not just on Twitch but in general, in North America,” Piker said during a Monday broadcast. “Very odd way to operate."
