It’s been a very eventful month for Twitch streamer Asmongold. His live coverage of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial led to his channel becoming the most-watched on Twitch. Just weeks later and now Asmongold has been banned by Twitch in what’s certain to be viewed as a completely surprising and controversial decision. Less than 24 hours after his suspension, however, Asmongold is back streaming on Twitch after the platform reversed his ban. The circumstances of Asmongold’s situation are strange, to say the least.
Twitch has taken an aggressive stance regarding a streamer’s responsibility for all content shown on their stream. That includes language used by friends or teammates through Discord or in-game audio systems, as well as in-game text chats. Twitch does, of course, take into consideration the context of any TOS issue when deciding the severity of punishment. While it’s true that streamers often have no real control over these communication methods, they still have to do everything in their power to prevent Twitch TOS violations.
Following the suspension, Asmongold released a lengthy video on YouTube condemning what had happened on his stream as well as Twitch’s punishment. Asmongold accused Twitch of implying, through punishing him, that he supported racist language. Further, he believes the punishment will show trolls how they can get popular streamers banned in the future.
Despite Asmongold’s criticism of Twitch and his belief that he shouldn’t have to apologize for the situation, Twitch appears to have quickly changed its mind on the ban. A Twitter message from Asmongold confirmed that he was unbanned overnight and would be able to stream Saturday as per usual. There was no word on Twitch regarding the ban, so it’s unclear what impacted the platform’s decision to revert the suspension.
This kind of situation is obviously complicated and without a clear solution. Twitch streamers shouldn’t have racist language on their streams, but punishments for these situations need to fit the circumstances of the violation. In the end, Asmongold was only banned for so many hours, a length of time that may seem excessive in retrospect but potentially necessary if only to investigate the situation. In the end, both Twitch and Asmongold will be taking action to ensure the situation doesn’t happen again.
