The top streamer Disguised Toast was recently banned on Twitch. The reasons seemed to be similar to those of the also recently banned streamer Pokimane: He watched TV series live on stream and apparently received a copyright complaint. However, the supposed duration of the ban is currently shocking the Twitch community.
Who is Disguised Toast? Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang is a Canadian streamer. He started his career on YouTube, was live on Facebook for a while, and returned to Twitch in 2021. There he has 2.4 million followers and an average of 10,000 viewers. He is a well-known strategy genius and performed for years only with a quirky toast mask.
This is the ban: Disguised Toast was recently known for watching anime series live on stream with his viewers. But just 20 minutes before the finale of the series Death Note, his account was suddenly locked and Toast banned.
“They could have really waited another 20 minutes,” Toast humorously stated on Twitter when the ban became public on the night from Monday to Tuesday.
Is Toast’s punishment really 15 times higher than Pokimane’s?
What were the reasons for the ban? Apparently, Toast became the latest high-profile victim of bans due to copyright violations. After all, the series Death Note is not freely available and is actually only available to paying customers.
By providing the series to his fans for free, Toast clearly committed a copyright violation.
If a copyright complaint (DMCA strike) comes in at Twitch, they are obliged to act and stop the copyright violation. This has been known ever since the music industry took Twitch into the crosshairs during the pandemic.
Thus, Toast faced the same issue that had previously led to the banning of his colleague and Twitch partner Pokimane. She also streamed the series Avatar: The Last Airbender live and was banned for it.
How long is Toast gone now? Since Pokimane was only gone for 48 hours, fans expected a similarly short ban. However, a recent tweet from the streamer stated: “See you in a month”.
This, in turn, is interpreted by many colleagues of the streamer as a 30-day ban. That would be 15 times longer than Pokimane’s ban. Some streamer colleagues are shocked by the supposed severity of this punishment.
Among others, top streamers HasanAbi and Asmongold expressed their condolences. Valkyrae demanded “Free Toast!” and streamer Ludwig suggested going climbing in the mountains together for the month.
Update: According to streamer Slasher, the ban of Toast is not actually 30 days long, but also only 48 hours, just like with Pokimane. However, a clear statement from Toast himself is still pending. It’s possible that the streamer just wants to take a vacation and has therefore deliberately expressed himself unclearly in his tweet.
xQc snitches on Toast: “He’s much worse than I am”
Interestingly, Toast’s ban came shortly after an angry stream from streamer xQc. He was criticized and mocked online for also streaming copyrighted material. In his stream, he complained that he was being treated unfairly because Toast had streamed much more copyrighted content live.
What are the backgrounds? One reason for the unusually long ban could be that Toast was one of the first streamers to establish streaming series and did so excessively.
Among other things, he streamed entire episodes of the series Naruto and seemed not to care that this content is actually protected by copyrights.
By the way, top streamer Ludwig warned a long time ago that such actions could have drastic consequences.
