The German Player of the Year, streamer Pia “Shurjoka” Scholz, criticizes the streaming service Twitch on Twitter, where she earns her money. Twitch fails to protect its female streamers. It has become “ordinary” on the platform for streamers to make jokes about suicide or spread violent fantasies. Twitch does not respond to complaints.
For this, Shurjoka now criticizes Twitch:
- The streamer Shurjoka accuses Twitch of doing nothing to enforce its own rules.
- She has repeatedly complained about clear violations of the rules on Twitch, but her complaints are simply dismissed.
- Twitch even has a court order from the Frankfurt Regional Court stating that a streamer made unlawful statements against her, that she had provoked suicidal thoughts (via twitter). Nevertheless, Twitch does not react when other streamers repeat these statements.
“Twitch Monetizes Hate”
What things has Shurjoka reported? Shurjoka is apparently mainly concerned about statements from the streamer Nemesis316.
She accuses Nemesis316 of being successful only because he constantly engages with her. In December 2023, she had him banned with a DMCA strike from Twitch.
In 2023, he streamed 1,103 hours of “Just Chatting” and reached an average of 173 viewers.
She accuses the streamer of repeatedly breaking Twitch rules – but Twitch does not punish him, instead, they even promoted him to partner.
Shurjoka says that she has addressed in a panel that she and her environment have reported seventy legally relevant violations on Twitch: violations such as Holocaust relativism or fantasies of torture.
But the morals on Twitch have degenerated to such an extent that streamers would publicly admit to having actually done these things and even laugh about it (via twitter):
Twitch monetizes hate, fantasies of torture, and jokes about suicidality 2024.
Yesterday I spoke on a panel about how Twitch does not moderate hate, to such an extent that fully monetized streamers openly admit to committing rule violations while laughing.
Shurjoka
Streamer Believes: Twitch Rejects Reports Unchecked
What particularly annoys her? Shurjoka particularly criticizes that she has reported multiple clips that trivialize suicide. But Twitch rejects these reports.
She says: She was assured that real people would review her reports – but today all reports were viewed and rejected within a minute.
Can’t she clarify this differently? Shurjoka says that she sought a direct conversation with a Twitch employee who pointed out how important it is to provide specific timestamps in reports. If that was the case, the responsible TOS department would respond immediately to reports.
But even formally correct reports did not help, and the conversation was unproductive.
Shurjoka remarks: Twitch apparently laid off all employees from the TOS team in 2023 and the rest of the company did not notice.
It now seems as though violent fantasies are something that simply belong to Twitch’s business.
She says: It is “outrageous what is happening here.”
What does Nemesis say about it? The streamer commented on the allegations in a Twitch stream on April 11. He distances himself from them.
The image of the man with a rope around his neck has nothing to do with the trivialization of suicide for him, but is “a meme.”
The violent fantasies were just “a quick remark.”
Twitch Seems to Have a Major Weakness in Legal Areas
What could the problem be? In December 2023, Twitch acted in the conflict surrounding Shurjoka and permanently banned a streamer for allegedly joking about trauma.
However, he went to court and effectively showed up Twitch in a trial before the Braunschweig Regional Court.
Twitch appeared unprofessional in court, according to the streamer’s account. Their lawyers could not provide specific examples of misconduct, and Twitch did not meet the necessary conditions to ban the streamer, such as a warning and a precise rationale.
It seems that Twitch only had the strategy of explaining to the court that German law did not apply in the case of a permanent ban of a streamer and that the case would have to be treated under US law. When this strategy was rejected, they appeared quite helpless.
Other German streamers have successfully taken legal action against Twitch in the past and reclaimed their position on the platform.
In general, Twitch has repeatedly shown weaknesses in America when legal issues arose. For example, in 2020, the music industry exerted legal pressure on Twitch, and they immediately fell into a panic and passed this panic directly on to the streamers:
There’s a barrage of copyright penalties for streamers – Twitch admits: “This is on us”
