It’d be an understatement to call the current situation between the Twitch community and the United States military heated. It’s been tense enough that the US Army abandoned its Twitch channel for weeks, but following that retreat, it’s been confirmed that the Army will be back on Twitch and address the chief issues that landed it in hot water.
For the uninitiated, in recent weeks, the Army has drawn criticism for its presence on social media, a move largely seen as an attempt to recruit young people, with things coming to a head when it started banning Twitch users for asking about war crimes on its official esports channel. This soon led to the government stepping in, with US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introducing a measure that would effectively ban the military from having a presence on livestreaming websites.
Now that that amendment was voted down in the House of Representatives, though, the door is open for the Army to resume streaming on Twitch, which an Army spokesperson that spoke with Kotaku says will happen at an unspecified point “in the near future.”
On the matter of banned users, an official statement states that the US Army Esports Team is “reinstating access for accounts previously banned for harassing and degrading behavior on its Twitch stream.” Going on, the statement says that the team is “reviewing and clarifying” its livestreaming policies and “will provide all who have been banned the opportunity to participate in the space as long as they follow the team’s guidelines.”
The statement evidently doesn’t directly address the matter of people questioning the Army’s history of war crimes, instead highlighting “personal attacks, crude language, pornographic material, harassment and bullying” as things that won’t be tolerated on streams and will lead to retaliatory action. However, Kotaku notes that these new rules are essentially the same as the ones the Army employed before all the backlash, so it’s not immediately clear if there’ll be any meaningful difference between its new Twitch policies and the old ones.
In all likelihood, there will be continued debate over the ethics of the military using social media platforms as a recruitment tool for young people, especially ones that are popular with kids like Twitch, as well as how it handles the questions about war crimes in streams. One possibility is that the Army will begin utilizing only temporary chat bans, something the US Navy’s Twitch channel (which recently resumed streaming following its own hiatus) has been dealing out on a semi-regular basis. As many viewers have noted, though, even that seems to be in violation of First Amendment laws, so it remains to be seen how the situation might resolve itself.
Source: Kotaku