Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli IP's | Hacker News Reader

Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli IP's

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Twitch recently unbanned two rather anti-semitic individuals in the form of “FreshAndFit” and “sneako”, which makes this decision all the more perplexing. Do they want to appear as if they are anti-semitic?

Worth pointing out that FnF and Sneako are actual far-right anti-semites and not just the generic left-wing pro-Palestine activists.

Indeed. There’s a whole ‘nother controversy on the platform (which the tweet poster is a part of), but that’s far less clear cut than those two.

I thought that "FreshAndFit" were more associated with The Manosphere and Andrew Tate-like topics[1] than they were with the far-right and Israel. I also recall reading somewhere that the name is an online redpill euphemism for underage girls, too, which if true, somehow manages to make it even more problematic than anti-semitism does.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_and_Fit_Podcast

> more associated with The Manosphere and Andrew Tate-like topics[1] than they were with the far-right

[Insert "The Office" "They're the same picture" meme here.]

Like, seriously, these are not meaningfully separate groups. One is a subset of the other.

See this article from Media Matters for America: https://www.mediamatters.org/rumble/right-wing-dating-podcas...

To pick a recent tweet (warning about content as per usual): https://xcancel.com/MyronGainesX/status/1846656922143150534

> Kicker? You'll never guess what his mom is...

(Drake’s mother is Jewish.)

Yeah, for many people in the US, vision is usually tunneled to 2 sides. But out there are many sides.

I'm glad we miraculously re-discovered the value of free speech just in time for this most recent wave of antisemitism. /s

A possible explanation might be an automated anti-botnet system running wild.

Israel and Palestine are an edge case with a comparatively small population and very active cyberwarfare groups, leading to a relatively high amount of bot traffic.

But even that's quite a stretch, as the error message suggests a country-wide block instead of blocking one or a few ISPs.

A lot of pro-Palestinian online activism actually comes from the Israeli IP ranges. There are two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship inside Israel and they are free to do pro-Palestinian activism as long as it doesn't call for the destruction of Israel or supports groups listed as terror groups.

These kind of IP range blocks tend to hurt the people they intended to help.

Rumors say it was explicitly blocked on an alleged github push

The Twitter account posting this seems a bit unhinged, with the snitch tagging of everyone from th ADL to the ACLU and the weird speculation about a "purple haired" person. I'm not inclined to take their description of the scope of the block at face value; is there a better source?

(Also, Twitch is within their rights to decide in which countries they offer their service, and there could be any number of reasons for that kind of decision.)

FYI Purple haired person is the Israeli nickname for Netanyahu. He dyes his hair and it occasionally picks up a purple tint. It's silly and childish, there's plenty of horrible things to say about him other than his appearance.

It's not about Twitch having a right to block a country. It's stealth blocking which seems contradictory to their parent companies policy. There are a lot of complaints against Amazon in this regard e.g. an Amazon employee is a hostage in Gaza yet people aren't allowed to mention his name within Amazon. This is in stark contrast to nvidia which also has an employee hostage in Gaza.

In context the thing about a purple-haired person is about a hypothetical Twitch trust-and-safety employee, not about Netanyahu.

What’s more likely, an Amazon owned company blocking Israeli accounts on moral/ethical grounds or some backend technical reason? My guess is the latter…

Or one employee being an activist and sneaking in a config change.

If we’re getting specific, a botnet in the region creating accounts might trigger a precautionary lock down like this.

Up until recently support responded to tickets of people asking why they couldn't sign up telling them they were forbidden to join. So it was at least semi-official and allowed as a reason for closing support tickets.

I don't usually comment on here, I just lurk but this whole week has been super weird when it comes to twitch. Letting antisemites back on the platform, never punishing people literally spreading terrorist propaganda. Destiny (the streamer not the game) alleges that this block has been in place since october 13th of last year, but for now the only solid proof is that it has been in place since may of this year so take that with a grain of salt.

edit: oh yeah forgot about the racial tier list platform at a sponsored official event lol

Racial tier list?

Jayzus, I don’t want to invoke Godwin, but it sort of invokes itself…

> Letting antisemites back on the platform, never punishing people literally spreading terrorist propaganda.

Surely we can engage in this topic without resorting to blatantly inflammatory language.

Why would they do this? It's a political statement from Amazon?

maybe excessive fake/bot account creations, which might be impacting quality of discussions

The block was hardcoded into the source code on October 13, 2023. I think it would have been done by one of the ops teams if it was required by management.

Probably just something done by a single dev.

Is there a source for this?

We'll know for sure the next time twitch's source code leaks

Googling it returns this HN comment, so probably not. They are correct though when saying that the block has been in place for at least a few months now: https://x.com/Forceultraomega/status/1795189735297605635

Screenshot of the source code: https://x.com/StopAntisemites/status/1848445010708205758

Hardcoded; only Palestine and Israel.

Looks like they’ve been doing it since the start of the war, unless we have better source that it’s new than a tweet? I think it’s just coming up now because of twitch con related controversy.

Either way it appears to be an attempt to keep themselves out of the spotlight, controversy wise. Definitely not a political statement, if for no other reason than they haven’t issued any statements. Also, the title is understandable given the relative internet access rates, but the slightly more accurate one would be “Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli and Palestinian IPs”.

Seems like a way, way worse way to avoid controversy than simply banning war streamers, but who am I to say. Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.

ETA: whatever the reason is, it appears to be policy, not technical: https://x.com/not_JayVee/status/1848031193469501473

Russian streamers are still on Twitch including pro-war Russian streamers who did some rather tasteless streams on the first days of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

> Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.

There's a very large difference here. They know what decision about those will get them into trouble and what decisions won't.

Or rather, it's also obvious what decisions will get a large US company into trouble on the context of the Israel wars. Every single one of them, whatever direction they are biased into.

Maybe to stop idf or hamas soldiers posting videos of violence. There’s plenty of cases of that being posted to X. twitch being realtime would have a much harder time blocking or removing it

I have no sources backing this, but I think it could be related to the ban of a big streamer recently who made a "controversial" stance about what's happening in Gaza [0] and that could have lead to some people mass creating accounts on Twitch (that would not be unheard of when that kind of events happen, but again, I haven't seen any report of that happening).

[0]: https://x.com/HasanabiProd/status/1845889127629176966

The block seems to be in effect since at least May: https://x.com/Forceultraomega/status/1795189735297605635

So unlikely has anything to do with a recent ban.

Amazon itself has worked just fine Israeli IPs and I assume Palestinians also. The fact the block was both for Israeli and Palestinians combined makes me think this actually wasn't an anti Israeli / anti Palestinian decision. It was something else (official explanation by Twitch was that after the October 7th massacres they wanted to prevent new sign ups from the region uploading graphic massacre content which is believable to me).

Twitch has resolved the issue affecting both Israeli and Palestinian users per their latest tweet: https://x.com/TwitchSupport/status/1848191418377830708

There is context that makes this not just look like a simple technical issue. Twitch promotes a certain twitch streamer who is openly and brazenly supportive of hamas terrorists, and has said some very evil things, and spread a lot of disinformation, by any measure violating many rules. Then there is the 2 people being unbanned that others mentioned, both of which doing similar things. Interestingly, the first person I mentioned is far-left, and these 2 people (atleast one of them) are far right.

So it definitely goes beyond just looking like an innocent error in my eyes. I can't think of any logical reason whatsoever they'd ban israelis intentionally.

It is well known that Israel uses botnets and user-controlled fake accounts to steer public opinion in social media.

Reddit, youtube, instagram and lots of media outlets are flooded with pro-israeli propaganda or massive downvoting to any critizism against Israel. Also here in hacker news...

> It is well known that Israel...

It is well known that any cybersecurity aware country... here I point to some papers/articles [1][2][3] just as a reference of the modus operandi, not to isolate a particular country.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.07109

[2] https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/gf7jb/download

[3] https://www.foi.se/download/18.6b6fc4521690ffa2022169/155076...

Hey now, the ones on hackernews probably do it for free on their own time.

On company time

Here on HN I tend to see the opposite: lots of staunch anti-israelism, sometimes bordering on plain old antisemitism, along with these statements like yours. I have showdead and showflagged enabled, yet I don’t see the flood of propaganda you keep talking about.

I imagine @dang is pretty on top of clapping antisemitic comments on this platform, he’s not one to mess around.

I worry that softening the definition of antisemitism by saying things border on it is ultimately weakening the severity of the accusation long term. Like bigot and pedo, antisemite will soon be relegated to just another empty accusation before long.

Should I call people “cryptoantisemites” instead, when they dance on that thin line between “trying to be unbiased” and “calling to wipe Israel and its inhabitants from the map”, never actually uttering the latter aloud?

i think i even know who you are talking about specifically

You can call them whatever you want, as long as you can point to instances of what real users actually said.

Instead of referring to abstract/hypothetical users and what you think they might be saying in some alternate universe.

I actually think that would be an apt term for every Twitter account promoting an alt coin…

no, he isn't. there is a bunch of accounts that post comments like this. get at most slap on the wrist. but the one that get banned are pro-israeli accounts.

Do you have any evidence that Israeli-controlled accounts were operating on Twitch (a video-game livestreaming company), and that this required an entire country-level IP block after october 7th?

Also feasible that nationwide GPS spoofing in Israel makes it harder to automatically approve new account creations. If Israel is redirecting GPS systems to neighboring territories (eg. Syria or Iran) then it's pretty easy to see why those countries would be banned.

Geolocation does not use GPS, it uses IP addresses.

Can recommend the Bad Hasbara podcast if you want to listen to a sane discussion on Israeli propaganda, only a tiny amount of penis jokes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds...

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