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Comment by hobobaggins | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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