Summary
- Asmongold advocates for only banning Twitch users who break the law, not subjective rule violations.
- Twitch has updated its ban policy to provide more transparency, including sending video snippets of offending behavior.
- Twitch's ban system may become more forgiving, with bans now expiring after a certain time and allowing for reinstatement requests.
Twitch content creator Asmongold has stated that he wouldn’t ban anybody from the platform unless they broke the law. Twitch’s ban policy has long been a subject of debate, with many people arguing that the rules are applied inconsistently, depending on the stature of the streamer, or people are unbanned when they shouldn’t be, and vice versa.
The Amazon-owned platform regularly makes small tweaks to its terms of service and ban policy. For example, Twitch promised in September 2024 to be more transparent when suspending streamers by sending a snippet of when precisely the offending behavior occurred. In the past, banned creators were often left in the dark about why exactly they had been punished, leaving the door open for them to unwittingly commit the same error again.
Twitch Has Banned Sliker Again
Controversial streamer Sliker gets banned from the leading streaming platform Twitch once again, just hours after his sudden unbanning.
If it were up to Asmongold, nobody would ever get banned from Twitch unless they outright broke the law. Rather than subjective rule violations and seemingly arbitrary enforcement, only illegal activity would trigger a suspension. This stance, says the content creator, is purely from a “free speech perspective.” In this vein, Asmongold continued, even controversial streamers who engaged in questionable behavior or fostered toxic communities — like Destiny, Sneako, and Fresh& Fit — would never have been banned from the platform.
If Free Speech Were Considered, Many Channels Wouldn’t Be Banned, Says Asmongold
Destiny has been permabanned from Twitch since March 2022 for three possible reasons: “posting a combination of words and emotes in chat to promote denigration based on race, praising or supporting a hate crime… [and] advocating for the exclusion of a group of people based on their disability.” In September 2024, The Fresh & Fit podcast was removed from Twitch mid-stream during what many considered a misogynistic rant. Sneako was permabanned in October for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines and the US election.
Asmongold was recently banned himself for making controversial statements, and he believes that none of the aforementioned personalities are likely to be allowed back on the platform because they verifiably violated Twitch’s TOS. The platform’s policies go beyond simple legal considerations, and “realistically, Sneako and Fresh&Fit should’ve never been unbanned based on the stuff that they say,” the streamer pointed out.
The company’s ban system, which many feel is less lenient than that of other platforms, is seemingly on track to become more forgiving, however. In February, Twitch further updated its ban policy, adding an expiration date to bans. Minor violations will expire after 90 days, while more serious transgressions will disappear after a year or two. Furthermore, permabans are no longer necessarily permanent, as content creators can now request reinstatement after six months.