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> no other choice if they want to reach viewers

> are incredibly few esports careers that could survive a Twitch ban

(emphasis mine)

People have never been entitled to a sports career, or to celebrity status by reaching viewers on someone else's platform. These platforms have democratized the "rags to riches" story, but whether it was the '30s or the '60s or the '90s, you've always had to play by the rules of the prevailing media empire. This is no different.

Companies are generally allowed to set arbitrary criteria for who they're willing to work with. There are some very specific exceptions around discrimination against a very short list of protected classes. Other than that, rules restricting conduct are usually legal. Note that I'm not claiming that rules like these are moral, I'm just pointing out that they're usually found to be legal when challenged.

The fact that you can sign up for an account in your bedroom in pajamas instead of signing documents at a lawyer's office in Hollywood doesn't magically make this a public square subject to a different set of rules.

No, it just means your eligibility for a professional career may come down to whether or not a random mod on a streaming platform simply thinks it's "funny" to ban you.

Then maybe you should reconsider your choice of professional careers if that's a risk factor and your risk tolerance isn't high enough.

Imagine this response in the context of a sport like the NBA. If the ref is secretly racist and bans you from the sport because it's "funny" as their excuse, would you react this way? The nature of videogames doesn't make the professional sport of them juvenile and less worthy of rigorous standards for inclusion.

The NBA is an organization who's job it is to set rules that teams, athletes, and referees can participate in. They can choose to fire refs who behave this way, and they would because they make more money if the refs aren't racists (especially now that they're getting more into racial activism)

Twitch is basically the NBA of their streaming platform, as in they set rules for how streamers, viewers, and moderators interact. Twitch can create whatever arbitrary rules it wants to maximize their revenue. If advertisers stopped caring about controversy, or if Twitch suddenly found a better revenue source, they would surely pursue it.

The irony of your comment is that once upon a time, these professional sports leagues made more money by being actively racist and excluding people of color from their leagues lest they upset their white fan base.

I don't know how long ago "once upon a time is" but they seem to have increasing revenue very successfully since the 80s at the least based on some googling. Maybe before then, but I don't know if we can find any data to support that.

Your analogy is wrong, and so was mine. It is not the refs banning players, it would be the television sports broadcasters. Makes even less sense.

Pretend Harvey Weinstein is talking to you. And that he's reading the top-most comment (by newbie789) on this story: that he owns the company, so he can ban you at his discretion. Or gaslight you. Or show you shock porn. That this is fine, because it's how its always worked here.

I'll tentatively assume you got some of the same visceral recoil I got from that mental image. And that we agree that following everything Hollywood does is probably not for the best. So I'll ask you: if you could solve this however you'd like (by passing laws, let's say), how would you do it?

FWIW, I agree with you about the visceral recoil, thoughts about Hollywood practices not being ideal, etc. I'm not trying to claim that this state of affairs is good, just that it's basically identical to what we've had previously, and that the relevant laws don't appear to be affected by unprecedented scale or automation.

Passing laws to address this might work, but I think it would be difficult, and I would expect them to be challenged mercilessly. In order to actually work, I think this would require "Civil Rights Act" or "Equal Employment Opportunity Act" caliber landmark legislation, and I'm skeptical that this would be politically tenable any time soon.

I wholeheartedly disagree about the current state of affairs. Our relationship to the internet has profoundly changed. It’s deeply entwined in our daily life, inescapably so, in exactly the same way that forums were not.

But it does elevate Twitch bans far above the "this is just like a forum admin doing as he pleases, move along" of the original comment.

I can't stand comments like this that obviously miss the overall point being made and tbh it is entirely done disingenuously.

The terms of service are not in anyway enforced consistently or fairly. The way the terms and service is written is that they can basically boot you for any reason. It is well known that the "tiddie streamers" regularly get away with ToS violations, where some dude wearing a red hat will get a ban (and I mean a red hat, because that exactly what happened to one guy, he didn't even have a MAGA hat).

"Behaviour off platform" can mean anything and will be like the current Terms of Service be not be enforced in any manner that is consistent or fair.

Twitch is a monopoly in this space and it is abusing its position. This combined with the fact that the mobile phone platforms can remove an App for any reason it wants means that there is no open market where a competitor that has a different ToS can reasonably become competitive.

> a Twitch ban is effectively a ban on all opportunities that involve money in the esports scene.

I suggest you ask Colin Kaepernick about how it is in the non-'E' sports world.

(Edit: misspelled name)

I assume you mean Colin Kaepernick.

Thanks.

This is what I don't understand?

People are complaining about something that has been happening since literally forever. Long before Gopher and Mosaic were even released. Why is it "bad" now? The answer is that it is not bad, it's just that it now affects them.

Here's the thing though, waiting until it affects you, is a very poor strategy for changing what you consider to be a "wrong". This has all been litigated at this point. Now your only recourse is a wholesale change of the laws, which is not going to happen.

The dude who landed a big advertising campaign with Nike based on his high-profile activism?

In other words, he changed his line of work from a "sports athlete" to a "marketing guy".

The esports guys should take note at what happens to sports athletes who behave "badly". They typically don't get to participate in sports anymore.

Plenty of major streamers would tell you them switch to YouTube did more good for their careers than twitch.

ValkyRae, CourageJD, DrDisrespect, Anish Giri are some just off the top of my head.

In a way you have affirmed parent’s point: it’s the shareholders’ website, and they can mod it as they wish.

You just completely missed the point. Everyone knows who's website it is and that they "can" mod it as they wish. But at a certain scale some moral and ethical questions come into play.

Isn’t this just like other sports, where a star is pilloried for some indiscretion outside of their sport which can result in them being dropped from a team etc?

That is up to the team though. This is closer to a TV station banning somebody so now they can't compete in a sport that will be broadcast on that station, forcing the team to kick them off.

Shouldn’t a TV station be able to decide whether they want to promote a pedophile?

That is sort of the start of a strawman argument because Twitch bans for a lot of things, not just being a convicted pedophile. But even in that case I don't think it is fair to completely disallow somebody from appearing on a TV network. That also isn't what I would consider "promotion".

I don’t know if it’s a straw man when the actual policy this article is about mentions it

> The company is currently defining “serious offenses” as incidents of violent extremism, credible threats of mass violence, membership in a known hate group, sexual exploitation of children, and nonconsensual sexual activities, among others.

That is for actions off of Twitch. You can get banned for actions on Twitch that are not bad at all or completely accidental

Which effectively can also happen now. In fact the athlete is likely wealthy and will be ok despite his career crashing. This could in fact happen to the guy who waits on tables down town.

If he became internet infamous and the tv station covers it the business he works at might be obliged to fire him.

>This is closer to a TV station banning somebody

So the FCC won't let me be, or let me be me, so let me see...

Yeah, TV stations (like MTV) have been banning people in the past too.

Like how Lance Armstrong was banned for from professional sport for life for "not a crime"?

That was up to the sporting agencies though right? Not some third party network

USADA is the definition of a third party is it not? He was banned from ALL sports, not just cycling. So it would be like Twitch banning you from YouTube as well.

Like I said it is a sporting agency. Not some TV network or something. Sports aren't forced to cooperate with USADA but they do it for the good of the sport. That doesn't apply with Twitch at all.

I didn’t miss the point, I just have a different opinion.

Well, then eSports stars are getting to be just like regular sports stars.

I'm okay with that. I think sports approaches this with the appropriate level of maturity. Has any sports exec said something to the effect of

> I can also ban you if I don’t like you. Or if I think it’s funny, or really any other reason.

If they weren't dealing with dozens of 7- and 8-figure contracts, and earning millions themselves, but were instead moderating some piddly little forum nobody's ever heard for approximately $0 a year, they probably would have said almost exactly that.