The streamer flamelord1998 was randomly selected on October 14 to be part of the constant official transmission made by Twitch so that each channel has an opportunity to appear on the cover. However, this was cut just as flamelord1998 was about to answer a question related to Hong Kong.
Forbidden to mention Hong Kong
There are multiple recent cases where the mere mention of Hong Kong is enough to be censored by some media. The most popular case of the last week is that of the Hearthstone player “blitzchung”, who was expelled from the Blizzard Grandmasters tournament for publicly showing his support for the country’s protests (an act that also cost the job to the casters of the event).
On this occasion, the streamer flamelord1998 was casually cut off from Twitch’s featured stream just before answering a user a question related to HK.
The situation occurred during the stream of the events after “The End” of Fortnite, which has brought together thousands of users to discuss the future of the game and other varied issues while they wait for the return of the video game (Fortnite chapter 2 is now available at the time of writing this note).
Flamelord1998 was commenting on a theory about the black hole that devoured the game map while interacting with the viewers, answering some of their questions.
A user wanted to know what his opinion was about what is happening in Hong Kong, to which flamelord1998 began responding, “Uh, in all honesty, I’ve been …”, and with that, he was cut off from the Twitch homepage. Although it may be that the streamer spent his featured time, this is the second case of a sudden cut by Twitch in less than 24 hours.
A not so random bot
The program that selects random streamers may not be as impartial as it claims to be.
Less than 24 hours ago, the streamer “Marcus Ranger” was also cut off unexpectedly at the time he recommended his viewers to watch a video of Ninja on YouTube, a streamer that now broadcasts from Mixer, a platform owned by Microsoft, and Twitch’s direct competition.
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