Following the heavy-handed controversy surrounding the US Army's tactics of recruiting young people via Twitch livestreams, an amendment was introduced by AOC that would've ended the military's right to do so. Earlier this evening, the bill was voted down on the House floor.
The heat between Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the US Army's Twitch channel began around the time that the soldiers were seen banning users who mentioned war crimes in the chat. Only a few days following this, the same US Army Twitch account was caught running fake giveaways as a form of a recruitment tactic. In fact, the main purpose of the existence of the US Army's social media presence is its effort to recruit young people to the Army and Navy, knowingly targeting minds as young as 12 to 13 years of age at times.
Several organizations followed up by criticizing the Twitch channel for being unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment, claiming that the US Army's censoring of the discussion of war crimes goes against freedom of speech rights. One of the many supporters of the claim was Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, often shorthanded to AOC. She proposed a draft of the amendment on July 22nd, directly targeting the military's usage of Twitch as an outlet.
But after a passionate speech in front of the House Representatives with the power to make that change, saying "Children should not be targeted in general for many marketing purposes in addition to military service," the amendment was put down in a failed vote on the evening of Thursday, July 30th. If it had passed, it would've made changes to the direction of the Pentagon's annual budget, navigating funds away from social media usage by the military branches. A recent Tweet from AOC, perhaps in frustration at the 45 to 105 votes against the bill, suggests that a large problem with getting the bill passed is due to her colleague's lack of understanding of what Twitch is and the gravity of its platform.
Still, in somewhat of a victory for the Democratic Party Reps backing this amendment, the US Army announced they would retreat from Twitch following the backlash due to the fake giveaways. A consultant stated it would step away from social media usage with no timeframe in regards to returning, but Twitch has yet to release its own official statement about the US Army's usage of the streaming platform.