The streamer Mohamed “Ziqo” Beshir is an experienced streamer who has showcased the MMORPG “World of Warcraft” on Twitch for 10 years. He has achieved a lot in WoW over the 10 years and has never done anything wrong. Now he has been banned by Twitch for a week. He says he doesn’t know why. But the ban has serious consequences for his channel and career.
Who is he? The streamer Ziqo has roots in Egypt but lives in Sweden. He has been a prominent figure in the WoW community for many years. He has played an excellent Mage over the years and has been successful in the arena. He is primarily a PvP streamer, but he has also embarked on adventures in WoW Classic or attempted to uncover the secrets of the Black Market Auction House.
Ziqo was with the guild Method from 2017 to 2020 but left during the scandal like many others. He is now a professional content creator for Cloud 9, has worked with Blizzard, and was a shoutcaster at BlizzCon. He has been a solid and established WoW streamer on Twitch for many years. Ziqo has 208,000 followers, and when he streams, he averages 1,280 viewers.
He says: He has been with Twitch from the beginning. He was one of the first partners, one of the first to receive a sub button, and throughout all this time, he has never done anything wrong.
7 days ban ruins streamer important opportunities on Twitch
This is the ban: As Ziqo explains in a video, he recently received a ban from Twitch for “hate speech”. His channel is banned for a week.
The streamer says this ban has extremely negative effects on his career:
- He is losing his momentum. His channel was doing well after WoW Shadowlands and gained many new followers, but he sees this momentum in danger with the ban.
- Furthermore, he was actually scheduled to present at the Twitch Awards. This was an opportunity for him to introduce himself to more people. That opportunity has now burst. If he is banned, he cannot be on the first page of Twitch.
- Additionally, his channel is no longer in “Good Standing” with Twitch, so he cannot participate in Twitch bounty programs. This is a valuable income opportunity that is now blocked for him.
Streamer gets banned – Has no idea why
This is his problem: Ziqo says he has no clue what he was banned for. He insists he did not use hate speech. He is not aware of any wrongdoing. Inquiries at Twitch have not helped him; none of his contacts could provide assistance. Only the general reason for his ban is mentioned, but not the exact incident.
Ziqo bitterly jokes: Maybe he stretched himself in his chair so that Twitch interpreted it as a Nazi symbol. He rather believes that he might have had the trade chat in WoW open and that there were terrible words exchanged there.
The situation is weighing on him. He says: He would like to learn from mistakes. But he does not know what he could have done wrong.
He says: “I feel like a criminal. I have nightmares about it.”
This is what it’s about: It is indeed a problem for streamers that Twitch does not specify the exact reasons for a ban. Apparently, they do this for legal reasons. Twitch becomes vulnerable if the exact incident is made public.
The streamer DrDisrespect and his community still wonder why he was banned from Twitch a year ago. In many cases, however, streamers know exactly when they have broken a rule and expect a ban. But if something was indeed witnessed in the trade chat that Ziqo did not notice, such a ban out of the blue is bitter.
Streamer gets unbanned – after public outrage
Update 26.1. 10:00 AM: Here’s how it ended: The story had a good ending: In the night from January 25 to January 26, Twitch lifted the ban on streamer Ziqo. The ban was issued “incorrectly”, it is said.
Apparently, the case caused such an uproar in the community that Twitch reviewed it again and decided that the ban was a mistake.
However, Ziqo still lacks a detailed explanation as to why he was banned.
The streamer now believes: The ban may have been due to a misunderstanding at Twitch. In one stream, Ziqo said: “Fuck it” – he suspects that at Twitch they may have misheard him as “Faggot,” a derogatory term for homosexuals in English. This is a typical word for which you get banned on Twitch.
DrDisrespect explained how negatively a permanent Twitch ban can affect a streamer’s mental state in a video in October 2020:
Dr Disrespect is struggling with the Twitch ban, has real problems
