With nearly 7 million followers, Turner "Tfue" Tenney is the second-most popular streamer on Twitch. In one of his recent livestreams, Tfue appeared to use a racial slur while playing Minecraft. Tfue has deleted the stream from his recorded videos, but clips of it still exist online. In the video, Tfue is killing enemies and appears to say, "You guys f****** killed all the villagers, man. Ya'll motherf****** killed them n*****."
Tfue hasn't released a statement on his use of the slur, and Twitch hasn't released a statement on the situation either. Tfue's account hasn't been suspended for his use of the racial slur, despite the fact that doing so is against Twitch's guidelines. If Tfue were to be banned for this incident, it would be his third strike (previously he was suspended for using a different racial slur and for his chat being "toxic" to another streamer), which would mean that it would have to be a permanent ban, according to Twitch's own guidelines.
Some have speculated that Twitch's inaction in regards to Tfue stems from the fact that he is one of the site's top streamers. If Twitch were to suspend Tfue for the latest incident, then it would be forced to permanently ban him, which would cost the streaming site a lot of money.
Twitch has been accused of treating bigger Twitch channels better than smaller ones, and in fact, refusing to discipline them for actions that would get other accounts in trouble. One of the most significant examples of this is in the case of Alinity, who some felt deserved to be banned from Twitch for doing things like tricking her cat into licking alcohol off her lips. Rumors spread that Alinity had "dirt" on Twitch executives, though others believe that the inaction was simply due to her being a popular Twitch streamer.
Since Twitch has so far refused to take action against Tfue, it certainly lends credibility to the narrative that the site gives preferential treatment to its top streamers, and that they aren't really beholden to the same rules as everyone else. Of course, Twitch may be still investigating the situation before it takes action, but again, no official statement has been released at this time to give people an idea of exactly how Twitch is handling it.
And with Ninja leaving Twitch for Mixer, it seems even less likely that the streaming giant would be willing to ban one of its top streamers. Needless to say, It will be interesting to see how this situation develops.
Source: The Verge