Twitch quietly stopped sign-ups from Israel and Palestine over a period of a year. They are caught out and claim it was to 'prevent uploads of graphic materials'

Since the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, the ongoing conflict between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, which has now expanded into Lebanon, threatens to further destabilise Middle East, has dominated the global news coverage.

Twitch recently banned popular user Asmongold after a racist anti Palestinian rant. His profile, thanks to its popularity, put Twitch policies surrounding the October 7 attack against Israel and the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, under the microscope. Twitch has been blocking new users from Israel and Palestine since October 7, 2023, as reported by 404 Media. Twitch issued an apology and a correction almost immediately after this was made public.

"We regret this unacceptable mistake and the confusion that it has caused." Twitch's support account stated that after the October 7, 2023 attacks we temporarily disabled sign-ups with email confirmation in Israel and Palestine. We did this to prevent the upload of graphic material related the attack and protect users' safety.

Twitch has good reason to be cautious, as the instantaneous nature streaming has been used for broadcasting awful content. Facebook partially livestreamed the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019, which resulted in 51 deaths and 89 injuries. Payton Gendron, a New Yorker who livestreamed the attack on Twitch in May 2022 (11 of 13 victims were Black), killed ten and injured three people in a racist attack in a New York grocery store.

There are many more examples that support a platform such as Twitch taking an active stance in the context of real-world horrors: Especially October 7, 2023 when Hamas attackers livestreamed footage on Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp using the accounts of victims.

The initial decision makes sense. It seems that Twitch did not re-enable the email sign-ups after the immediate context passed. Users could still create new accounts by using phone verification.

"Signups weren't disabled and we continued seeing sign ups from both areas." Users could sign up using phone verification. Twitch said that they had discovered that we had accidentally disabled email verification for either region. "We've fixed it, so all affected users can now sign up with email confirmation."

Twitch's reasoning is plausible, but some people are not willing to accept it as truth. Twitch's recent moderation decisions, like unbanning Sneako for making anti-Semitic comments, have been scrutinized. These theories are undermined by the fact that Twitch didn't accept signups from Palestinians, but persist nonetheless.

However, there is one part of the explanation which does not make sense. Twitch claims that this was a ban on email addresses and not IP addresses.

"When you create a new CyberArk account from Israel, a message appears saying 'There is a Problem'," says Ran Bar Zik, senior architect at CyberArk. "When you view the server response, it is clear that the country's Ip has been blocked [...]. They have now released a 'explanation.' That they did this in order to protect.' "I think it's a bit of bullshit."

I'm not certain I'd go to that extent, even though Twitch has clearly retreated at speed and the majority of its replies are not very reasonable. This could be the exposing of a conspiracy, but I doubt it. It reminds me of the classic phrase: Never attribute malice to what can be attributed to incompetence.