Byron "Reckful" Bernstein is best known for his World of Warcraft streams on Twitch, but lately he's gotten attention due to a recent controversy about the streaming site's Terms of Service and how some users feel it is inconsistently enforced.
Over the past couple of weeks, there were two major incidents on Twitch. The first was when Reckful threatened to look up the information of someone in the chat and hire people to kill their family. "I will look up your information. I will find [everything] about you, and I will kill your entire family." Another streamer that was part of the stream attempted to cover up Reckful's threats, and then said that he was joking and meant it "in Fortnite." Despite making these threats, Reckful has not been banned by Twitch as of the time of this writing.
The second incident, meanwhile, occurred last week when speedrun streamer Mychal “Trihex” Jefferson referred to one of his friends with a homophobic slur. Trihex was then banned from Twitch for an undetermined amount of time. He later released an apology on social media, stating that he was going to "reflect & reform" during his time away from the streaming site.
Some Twitch users find it hypocritical that Trihex was banned from Twitch, but Reckful doesn't appear to have suffered any major consequences for his threats. Even if the threats were made as a joke, one could argue that what Trihex said to his friend was meant to be a "joke" as well, and by that logic, he shouldn't have been banned. Reddit user anony312 pointed out the hypocrisy by stating, "They banned my boy TriHex for making a joke with his friend but not Reckful for all those threats." anony312 then clarified that they didn't want Reckful banned, but rather Twitch to be more consistent with how it punishes users that break its Terms of Service.
As Twitch continues to grow as a platform, issues like this will continue to rise. Moving forward, it's clear that the streaming platform will have to come up with more consistent punishment for users that break its ToS, though how it will accomplish this exactly remains to be seen.