Twitch have temporarily banned an account run by streamer Asmongold, otherwise known as Zack Hoyt, after he expressed genocidal sentiments about Israel’s killing of Palestinian people in Gaza. According to the eSports journalist Rod Breslau, he’s been sent to the naughty step for a grand total of two weeks, which I’m sure will be a huge inconvenience and will really teach him the error of his ways. Assuming Breslau’s sources are accurate, it’s a great demonstration of Twitch’s tolerance for streamers with big audiences, the kind of slap on the wrist you’d expect from a platform that recently reinstated Donald Trump’s account after banning him in 2021 for the charge of inciting an insurrection.
Content warning for hate speech in the paragraphs ahead.
You will almost certainly know the context, but in case you don’t: in October 2023, several Palestinian armed groups led by Hamas, who govern the Gaza strip, broke through the border into Israel and carried out a massacre, killing over a thousand people including civilians and children. Israel’s government and military have responded by mounting a year-long invasion of Gaza that has killed over 42,000 Palestinians and reduced the region to ruin.
All this builds on decades of Israeli containment of and intervention within Gaza, which a United Nations special rapporteur has argued is a form of apartheid. The UN have repeatedly condemned Israel’s killing of civilians, together with the atrocities carried out by Hamas, who are still holding a number of Israelis hostage. Back in March this year, another UN special rapporteur argued that there are “reasonable grounds” for defining Israel’s current operations in Gaza as genocide.
Asmongold appears to agree that Israel’s actions are genocide, but he seemingly thinks the Palestinians deserve it, based on his own, sweepingly racist assessments of Islam and of Palestinian culture.
“If you want to consider it genocide as a systematic killing of a group of people, they have genocide built into Sharia law right now,” Asmongold said during the stream, as preserved by PCGamer. “So no, I’m not going to cry a fucking river when people who have genocide that’s baked into their laws are getting genocided. I don’t give a fuck. They’re terrible people. It’s not even a question. It’s crazy that people don’t see it that way. They’d be doing the same thing.
“These people are not your allies,” he went on. “They’re not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible. It kills people for their identity, and it is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways. It is that simple. No, I don’t feel bad for them, I don’t feel sorry for them, I don’t care.”
All of this is a clear infringement of Twitch’s ban on hate speech. Here’s an excerpt from their community guidelines: “Twitch does not permit behaviour that is motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, including behaviour that promotes or encourages discrimination, denigration, harassment, or violence based on the following protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, colour, caste, national origin, immigration status, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, serious medical condition, and veteran status.”
Naturally, a number of people have lodged complaints about Asmongold’s tirade. And of course, he has now apologised. “Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing,” he wrote on Xitter, adding “my bad” and “of course no one deserves to have their life destroyed even if they do things or have views I find regressive”. In conclusion, “you guys deserve more than me saying stupid shit like that, I’ll do better”.
Twitch’s ban only applies to Asmongold’s secondary “Zackrawrr” account, but it also means he can’t stream via his primary account either. However, he’s still free to publish videos on Youtube, where he has about 4.85 million combined subscribers. Asmongold himself has reportedly earned many millions from Twitch, more than enough on paper to ride out any temporary suspension of service.
All this is of broader relevance because Twitch, a streaming service that focuses on video games, is absolutely huge. It’s one of the most visited websites in the world. As such, it’s a prominent internet “town square” where the most-subscribed streamers can potentially shape the views of millions of people – as the management themselves acknowledged back in 2021, when they shut down Trump’s account to avoid any further incitement to violence.
As Asmongold’s colleague TipsOutBaby has discussed on Twitter, referencing his own experience as a Muslim and child of Syrian immigrants, Asmongold’s comments reflect long-established patterns of “calculated dehumanization” that create the conditions for bloodshed, consisting of the same language that is “used to justify wanton violence, genocide, and the destruction of our universal brotherhood”. You’d think all that would warrant more than two weeks in the wilds. We asked Twitch for comment about all this yesterday – they haven’t responded.