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?

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.

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.)

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…

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

Why would they do this? It's a political statement from Amazon?

Twitch has resolved the issue affecting both Israeli and Palestinian users per their latest tweet: https://x.com/TwitchSupport/status/1848191418377830708

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...

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.

Can recommend the Bad Hasbara podcast if you want to listen to a sane discussion on Israeli propaganda, only a tiny amount of penis jokes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds...

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.

ETA: whatever the reason is, it appears to be policy, not technical: https://x.com/not_JayVee/status/1848031193469501473

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.

Probably just something done by a single dev.

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

maybe excessive fake/bot account creations, which might be impacting quality of discussions

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).

[0]: https://x.com/HasanabiProd/status/1845889127629176966