By Jake Selway
While there was plenty to celebrate for Twitch in 2022, the streaming service still had to dish out several high-profile bans during the year.
The Twitch streaming platform is home to huge swathes of aspiring and established content creators, with the metas and top creators of the site often shifting and surprising viewers. This endless vying for audience attention on the platform can lead to some fantastic displays of live-streamed entertainment, but can of course lead to more controversial and stigmatic practices.
This more problematic behavior that is often displayed on the Twitch platform usually garners quite a lot of attention, especially given how it more often than not results in bans. With even the most high-profile of creators on the platform often falling victim to these bans, it is unsurprising that 2022 showcased plenty of controversial and attention-grabbing sanctions.
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JiDion
One of the earliest and most high-profile bans on the Twitch platform in 2022 concerned the popular streamer JiDion. With the streamer quickly rising to stardom via his prank content, it only seemed a matter of time before the creator landed himself in hot water. In January 2022, JiDion acted upon a personal grievance against other top platform creator Pokimane, in which JiDion told his viewers to raid Pokimane's streams to spam hateful messages in her chat.
With this behavior clearly breaching Twitch's policy on spam and harassment, JiDion was quickly issued a 14-day ban, which was later extended to a permanent suspension. Although the two streamers have since settled their differences, JiDion remains permanently banned to this day, marking one of the largest and most severe suspensions that a creator of that size received in 2022.
Greekgodx
Popular streamer Greekgodx was the recipient of several bans throughout 2022, the first of which came in June. During the stream that warranted this first punishment, Greekgodx went on a controversial tirade about his dating standards for women, which many labeled as archaic and chauvinistic. Greek would go on to claim that the ban was actually issued due to him twerking on stream, with the ban only lasting three days in total.
However, shortly after this in July, Greekgodx would receive a more severe ban, this time lasting two weeks. During a public IRL stream, Greekgodx appeared to make racially insensitive gestures and noises as an Asian family walked past him, which many viewers were quick to point out. The streamer again denied the accusations against him claiming his actions were completely unrelated to the family, but Twitch remained firm in issuing a two-week ban for hateful conduct.
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Adin Ross
Adin Ross' presence on Twitch has grown massively in recent years, with the streamer currently commanding over 7 million followers and over 30,000 active subscriptions. With that being said, the streamer is no stranger to controversy, and famously received a month-long ban from the platform in August 2022.
Interestingly, the incident that allegedly led to this lengthy ban did not occur on one of Ross' steams, but supposedly occurred during a stream by one of Ross' friends and fellow content creators called YourRAGE. During the stream in question, Ross was alleged to be on the receiving end of a phone call, and could be heard using hom*ophobic slurs. YourRAGE would go on to deny that the person on the phone call was Ross, but the allegations and evidence that came from the stream were enough for Twitch to issue a month-long ban to the streamer in what was quite a high-profile move.
Destiny
Destiny is a political streamer who was a veteran to the Twitch platform, who began his streaming career as far back as 2011. While the streamer started his career by streaming gameplay of titles such as StarCraft, the more debate-centric and politically charged nature of Destiny's channel after 2016 predictably led to higher levels of controversy and attention for the content creator.
Despite Destiny's well-established presence on the platform, the streamer shockingly received an indefinite ban from Twitch in March 2022. The broader reasoning for the permanent ban was for "hateful content," although it was never confirmed what exactly led to this categorization from Twitch. Many have theorized that the ban most likely stemmed from Destiny's appearance on a stream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, or due to comments Destiny made regarding transgender athletes.
Twitch's Gambling Ban
August 2022 saw an unprecedented move be made by the Twitch platform, in which the lucrative gambling scene that many of the site's top content creators often partook in was permanently banned. Prior to the ban, the likes of xQc, Adin Ross, and Trainwreckstv would often engage in online crypto gambling on stream, with certain streamers committing to multi-million dollar contracts to promote certain gambling cites to their audiences.
While this practise was already regarded as controversial by many on the platform, the news of streamer ItsSliker scamming viewers and close friends out of $200,000 to fund a gambling addiction led to widespread demands for a platform-wide ban of gambling content. Some of Twitch's top creators such as Pokimane were extremely vocal in demanding that gambling be prohibited on Twitch, with the platform acting upon the pressure by completely banning this form of content on the site.
This effectively wiped out a huge emerging meta on Twitch, with many creators on the other side of the argument labeling the decision as reactive and needlessly restrictive. Given the amount of money involved and the amount of attention that the action garnered, it is clear that the banning of gambling on Twitch was one of the biggest bans on the platform in 2022.
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