Twitch recently unbanned two rather anti-semitic individuals in the form of “FreshAndFit” and “sneako”, which makes this decision all the more perplexing. Do they want to appear as if they are anti-semitic?
I thought that "FreshAndFit" were more associated with The Manosphere and Andrew Tate-like topics[1] than they were with the far-right and Israel. I also recall reading somewhere that the name is an online redpill euphemism for underage girls, too, which if true, somehow manages to make it even more problematic than anti-semitism does.
A possible explanation might be an automated anti-botnet system running wild.
Israel and Palestine are an edge case with a comparatively small population and very active cyberwarfare groups, leading to a relatively high amount of bot traffic.
But even that's quite a stretch, as the error message suggests a country-wide block instead of blocking one or a few ISPs.
A lot of pro-Palestinian online activism actually comes from the Israeli IP ranges. There are two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship inside Israel and they are free to do pro-Palestinian activism as long as it doesn't call for the destruction of Israel or supports groups listed as terror groups.
These kind of IP range blocks tend to hurt the people they intended to help.
The Twitter account posting this seems a bit unhinged, with the snitch tagging of everyone from th ADL to the ACLU and the weird speculation about a "purple haired" person. I'm not inclined to take their description of the scope of the block at face value; is there a better source?
(Also, Twitch is within their rights to decide in which countries they offer their service, and there could be any number of reasons for that kind of decision.)
FYI Purple haired person is the Israeli nickname for Netanyahu. He dyes his hair and it occasionally picks up a purple tint. It's silly and childish, there's plenty of horrible things to say about him other than his appearance.
It's not about Twitch having a right to block a country. It's stealth blocking which seems contradictory to their parent companies policy. There are a lot of complaints against Amazon in this regard e.g. an Amazon employee is a hostage in Gaza yet people aren't allowed to mention his name within Amazon. This is in stark contrast to nvidia which also has an employee hostage in Gaza.
What’s more likely, an Amazon owned company blocking Israeli accounts on moral/ethical grounds or some backend technical reason? My guess is the latter…
Up until recently support responded to tickets of people asking why they couldn't sign up telling them they were forbidden to join. So it was at least semi-official and allowed as a reason for closing support tickets.
I don't usually comment on here, I just lurk but this whole week has been super weird when it comes to twitch. Letting antisemites back on the platform, never punishing people literally spreading terrorist propaganda. Destiny (the streamer not the game) alleges that this block has been in place since october 13th of last year, but for now the only solid proof is that it has been in place since may of this year so take that with a grain of salt.
edit: oh yeah forgot about the racial tier list platform at a sponsored official event lol
Looks like they’ve been doing it since the start of the war, unless we have better source that it’s new than a tweet? I think it’s just coming up now because of twitch con related controversy.
Either way it appears to be an attempt to keep themselves out of the spotlight, controversy wise. Definitely not a political statement, if for no other reason than they haven’t issued any statements. Also, the title is understandable given the relative internet access rates, but the slightly more accurate one would be “Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli and Palestinian IPs”.
Seems like a way, way worse way to avoid controversy than simply banning war streamers, but who am I to say. Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.
> Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.
There's a very large difference here. They know what decision about those will get them into trouble and what decisions won't.
Or rather, it's also obvious what decisions will get a large US company into trouble on the context of the Israel wars. Every single one of them, whatever direction they are biased into.
Russian streamers are still on Twitch including pro-war Russian streamers who did some rather tasteless streams on the first days of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The block was hardcoded into the source code on October 13, 2023. I think it would have been done by one of the ops teams if it was required by management.
Amazon itself has worked just fine Israeli IPs and I assume Palestinians also.
The fact the block was both for Israeli and Palestinians combined makes me think this actually wasn't an anti Israeli / anti Palestinian decision. It was something else (official explanation by Twitch was that after the October 7th massacres they wanted to prevent new sign ups from the region uploading graphic massacre content which is believable to me).
Maybe to stop idf or hamas soldiers posting videos of violence. There’s plenty of cases of that being posted to X. twitch being realtime would have a much harder time blocking or removing it
I have no sources backing this, but I think it could be related to the ban of a big streamer recently who made a "controversial" stance about what's happening in Gaza [0] and that could have lead to some people mass creating accounts on Twitch (that would not be unheard of when that kind of events happen, but again, I haven't seen any report of that happening).
There is context that makes this not just look like a simple technical issue. Twitch promotes a certain twitch streamer who is openly and brazenly supportive of hamas terrorists, and has said some very evil things, and spread a lot of disinformation, by any measure violating many rules. Then there is the 2 people being unbanned that others mentioned, both of which doing similar things. Interestingly, the first person I mentioned is far-left, and these 2 people (atleast one of them) are far right.
So it definitely goes beyond just looking like an innocent error in my eyes. I can't think of any logical reason whatsoever they'd ban israelis intentionally.
It is well known that Israel uses botnets and user-controlled fake accounts to steer public opinion in social media.
Reddit, youtube, instagram and lots of media outlets are flooded with pro-israeli propaganda or massive downvoting to any critizism against Israel. Also here in hacker news...
Do you have any evidence that Israeli-controlled accounts were operating on Twitch (a video-game livestreaming company), and that this required an entire country-level IP block after october 7th?
Here on HN I tend to see the opposite: lots of staunch anti-israelism, sometimes bordering on plain old antisemitism, along with these statements like yours. I have showdead and showflagged enabled, yet I don’t see the flood of propaganda you keep talking about.
I imagine @dang is pretty on top of clapping antisemitic comments on this platform, he’s not one to mess around.
I worry that softening the definition of antisemitism by saying things border on it is ultimately weakening the severity of the accusation long term. Like bigot and pedo, antisemite will soon be relegated to just another empty accusation before long.
no, he isn't. there is a bunch of accounts that post comments like this. get at most slap on the wrist. but the one that get banned are pro-israeli accounts.
Should I call people “cryptoantisemites” instead, when they dance on that thin line between “trying to be unbiased” and “calling to wipe Israel and its inhabitants from the map”, never actually uttering the latter aloud?
It is well known that any cybersecurity aware country... here I point to some papers/articles [1][2][3] just as a reference of the modus operandi, not to isolate a particular country.
For anyone that's confused, there was an event at TwitchCon where some streamers (including one Jewish person) created a tier list. The tier list ranked other streamers according to whether they should be given a "pass" to say the word 'habibi'. The categories included things like 'Arab', 'Arab-coded', and at the bottom 'Loves Sabra'. Sabra, in this case, is a well-known brand of (supposedly not good) hummus (I don't like even good hummus, so I don't know). There's a conspiracy theory (subscribed to by OP) that 'loves Sabra' was actually some kind of code-phrase for a Jewish person because there's a similar sounding Hebrew word that refers to a Jew born in Israel. This led to a lot of people getting very mad.
I say this is a conspiracy theory because if you listen to even five minutes of this (pretty unfunny, admittedly) panel, it's abundantly clear that they are indeed talking about bad hummus, not Jews. In fact, they rank a few known Jewish streamers as Arab or Arab-coded -- i.e. allowed to say 'habibi' -- and vice versa. And, as mentioned, one of the panelists is also Jewish.
There's also the fact that I don't think most people would know this Hebrew word, but would definitely have heard of the brand. So if this is some attempt to promote antisemitism, it seems pretty lousy. If this was an attempt at antisemitism, it also doesn't make much sense to single out only Jews born in Israel. Antisemitism doesn't make this distinction (at least that I've ever heard). It usually focuses exclusively on 'global cabals' and the 'new world order' and conspiracies of that nature.
sabra - humus and sabra - jew born in israel, it's literally same word. humus is called after jew born in israel as this is brand of humus of israeli company
Twitch has now suspended multiple streamers on the panel, for hateful conduct. How do you reconcile that with your characterisation of the outage as a conspiracy theory?
It's a simple answer. Businesses are amoral organizations that only care about a few things, some of them being profits and their image (which is tied to their profits). I would've been surprised if Twitch didn't suspend them given that the ADL and other powerful political organizations were exerting pressure. From Twitch's perspective it's such a minute price to pay.
I am predispositioned to agree with this wholeheartedly but the member of a civil society in me has to draw a line at conspiratorial suggestions in the last sentence.
I gotta point out that sort of thing isn't appropriate even in my in-group, so I can make fun of it when the out-group does it.
If I were more honest and had more time, I'd have the courage to suggest that even though I assumed the first part is true, I shouldn't have, especially given the overall standards of evidence seem low.
Or the less insane answer is that there are some people who are antisemetic under the cover of being anti war and there are other people who call those who are anti war antisemetic
It's part of a pattern I've noticed with every Overton window: there's always a vocal minority who very loudly treat everything outside it as equivalent.
DDR called the Berlin wall an "anti-Facist protection barrier".
Extreme right in the USA calls the Democrats "communists".
Brexit extremists called every plan that wasn't theirs a betrayal and their supporters "quislings".
Last I heard, Netanyahu is keeping some extemists in power because without them he's not got the popular support needed to keep the job.
Also, do consider that the thing last year was proportionally much worse for Israel than 9/11 was for the USA.
That's not a justification, and I don't see it being good for Israel to support those extremists. (Obviously it's not good for Palestinians, but the extemists don't care about them).
Yeah I'm sure FnF and Sneako are just progressive pro-Palestine activists. Hasan the Turkish nationalist promoting anti-Jewish terrorism to his American underage viewers is also just "anti-zionism".
Why are you lying? FnF and Sneako blame Jews for "LGBT degeneracy". They're politically ultra-far-right antisemites and not progressive pro-Palestine activists.
Lying? I didn't even mention or talk about those people. "He" being the guy you responded to, saying that you cannot be against Israel's genocide and Zionist mission without being called an anti semite.
Both of your replies are examples of what Zionists usually do, thank you for showing us again.
And I don't even know who Sneako or FNF is, what they've done or said, or if they should be banned or not.
Also feasible that nationwide GPS spoofing in Israel makes it harder to automatically approve new account creations. If Israel is redirecting GPS systems to neighboring territories (eg. Syria or Iran) then it's pretty easy to see why those countries would be banned.
