The U.S. Army has a Twitch channel and an eSports team. The channel regularly streams Call of Duty: Warzone. However, when a question about war crimes arose, they brought out the banhammer.
This is how it goes for the U.S. Army on Twitch: The U.S. Army’s eSports team has over 10,000 followers on Twitch. They primarily stream shooters, such as CoD Warzone, Apex Legends, and Valorant. The streamers sit in full uniform and play the shooters virtually.
Now the Army and the Twitch channel are under fire. A toxic comment has transformed into a fundamental problem.
A viewer’s ban leads to criticism
Here’s what happened: During a stream, the user Really_chill_guy asked the question: “What’s your favorite u.s. w4r cr1me?”, which translates to “Was ist euer liebstes US-Kriegsverbrechen?”. The user then sent in a Wikipedia link that shows a long list of war crimes committed by the U.S.
The user was quickly banned by the moderators. U.S. veteran Joshua “Strotnium” David, who was streaming at the time, commented on the situation with, “Nice, really nice guy, have a great time getting banned, my friend.”
The situation gained special significance when eSports journalist Rod Breslau shared the clip on his Twitter account. He has already received almost 10,000 likes for it.
The clip shows the post from the user’s perspective, who asked about the war crimes. You can see that the user first had to bypass a profanity filter, which spelled “war” and “crime” incorrectly because the correct words were blocked.
After Breslau shared the clip, a shitstorm developed against the U.S. Army’s Twitch channel. More and more comments against the stream and the Army appeared in the chat.
For example, it was stated, “Oh, so you like video games? Well, you’ll love dying in a foreign country to protect the interests of the oligarchs back home.”
U.S. Army justifies ban with Twitch rules
How did the U.S. Army respond? After the comments increased, the stream was briefly taken offline. Afterwards, only users who had followed the channel for more than 24 hours could comment.
The U.S. Army’s Twitch team commented on these incidents to Vice, referencing a question from a user who wanted to discuss white phosphorus. This is a controversial killstreak in Modern Warfare that is said to have been used by the U.S. military in the past.
The eSports team said:
The question from this user was an attempt to shift the conversation in a way that implies that soldiers commit war crimes based on an optional weapon in a game, and we felt that this violated Twitch’s harassment policy.
The U.S. Army offers youth more than 150 different career options, and ultimately the goal of the Army eSports team is to accurately present this range of opportunities to interested youth.
What’s behind this?: Some gamers traditionally react allergically when “outsiders” use their medium for personal advertising, especially when it comes to controversial matters.
For example, the German Bundeswehr was criticized for seeking proximity to young men with an affinity for shooters at Gamescom.
Especially because the Bundeswehr often used provocative slogans like “More open world is not possible!” or “Multiplayer at its best!”
The U.S. President Donald Trump, and thus also the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Army, is also not really welcome on Twitch. He recently received a temporary ban for hateful content.
