Taking unwelcome or controversial stances on real-world issues like politics, ideology, and various activist topics can – depending on where they’re coming from – get people banned on social media platforms pretty quickly these days.
But will a game streaming service like Twitch act as strictly and swiftly when an apparent violation of its rules happens that concerns the platform’s primary business i.e., gaming and game streaming?
Jordie Jordan, aka Wings of Redemption, called on his fans to mass report another player.
The streamer tried to encourage fans to get the player banned, but he seems to have equally hoped to weaponize Twitch’s flagging system.
If he was, he might have been attempting to copy-cat the many previous examples of that system turning unfairly against streamer.
Moreover, Wings recently threatened to issue a false copyright strike against YouTuber ReviewTechUSA – that’s otherwise a common target of such strikes.
This new incident was exposed on Reddit, where Jordan’s words have been interpreted as encouraging his audience to falsely mass flag a player, which would run afoul of Twitch’s rules against false reporting and harassment.
Jordan deleted the stream, but a clip from it surfaced online where the streamer is heard saying that he has 800 people in the chat – and asking “anybody with a PlayStation” to go ahead and report his target “for toxicity.”
Another comment Jordan makes in conversation with another player implies that he in the past managed to get somebody in trouble using the same method.
But now, the streamer himself could get banned – if he has indeed broken any of Twitch’s rules that are, as pointed out, many and strict.
The rules that might have been violated here include deliberately submitting false reports, tampering with report evidence, or report brigading, as well as harassment – with false reporting on a game platform likely to fall into that last category, users of a Reddit thread have argued.
