No, it just means your eligibility for a professional career may come down to whether or not a random mod on a streaming platform simply thinks it's "funny" to ban you.

Then maybe you should reconsider your choice of professional careers if that's a risk factor and your risk tolerance isn't high enough.

Imagine this response in the context of a sport like the NBA. If the ref is secretly racist and bans you from the sport because it's "funny" as their excuse, would you react this way? The nature of videogames doesn't make the professional sport of them juvenile and less worthy of rigorous standards for inclusion.

The NBA is an organization who's job it is to set rules that teams, athletes, and referees can participate in. They can choose to fire refs who behave this way, and they would because they make more money if the refs aren't racists (especially now that they're getting more into racial activism)

Twitch is basically the NBA of their streaming platform, as in they set rules for how streamers, viewers, and moderators interact. Twitch can create whatever arbitrary rules it wants to maximize their revenue. If advertisers stopped caring about controversy, or if Twitch suddenly found a better revenue source, they would surely pursue it.

The irony of your comment is that once upon a time, these professional sports leagues made more money by being actively racist and excluding people of color from their leagues lest they upset their white fan base.

I don't know how long ago "once upon a time is" but they seem to have increasing revenue very successfully since the 80s at the least based on some googling. Maybe before then, but I don't know if we can find any data to support that.

Your analogy is wrong, and so was mine. It is not the refs banning players, it would be the television sports broadcasters. Makes even less sense.

Pretend Harvey Weinstein is talking to you. And that he's reading the top-most comment (by newbie789) on this story: that he owns the company, so he can ban you at his discretion. Or gaslight you. Or show you shock porn. That this is fine, because it's how its always worked here.

I'll tentatively assume you got some of the same visceral recoil I got from that mental image. And that we agree that following everything Hollywood does is probably not for the best. So I'll ask you: if you could solve this however you'd like (by passing laws, let's say), how would you do it?

FWIW, I agree with you about the visceral recoil, thoughts about Hollywood practices not being ideal, etc. I'm not trying to claim that this state of affairs is good, just that it's basically identical to what we've had previously, and that the relevant laws don't appear to be affected by unprecedented scale or automation.

Passing laws to address this might work, but I think it would be difficult, and I would expect them to be challenged mercilessly. In order to actually work, I think this would require "Civil Rights Act" or "Equal Employment Opportunity Act" caliber landmark legislation, and I'm skeptical that this would be politically tenable any time soon.

I wholeheartedly disagree about the current state of affairs. Our relationship to the internet has profoundly changed. It’s deeply entwined in our daily life, inescapably so, in exactly the same way that forums were not.

But it does elevate Twitch bans far above the "this is just like a forum admin doing as he pleases, move along" of the original comment.

I can't stand comments like this that obviously miss the overall point being made and tbh it is entirely done disingenuously.

The terms of service are not in anyway enforced consistently or fairly. The way the terms and service is written is that they can basically boot you for any reason. It is well known that the "tiddie streamers" regularly get away with ToS violations, where some dude wearing a red hat will get a ban (and I mean a red hat, because that exactly what happened to one guy, he didn't even have a MAGA hat).

"Behaviour off platform" can mean anything and will be like the current Terms of Service be not be enforced in any manner that is consistent or fair.

Twitch is a monopoly in this space and it is abusing its position. This combined with the fact that the mobile phone platforms can remove an App for any reason it wants means that there is no open market where a competitor that has a different ToS can reasonably become competitive.