Twitch silently stopped sign ups from both Israel and Palestine for over a year, gets caught out, says it was all 'to prevent uploads of graphic material'

pcgamer.com:

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has now spread into Lebanon and threatens to further destabilise the Middle East, has dominated global news coverage since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

Recently, Twitch banned the popular user Asmongold following a racist anti-Palestinian rant, which thanks to his profile put Twitch's policies around the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent ongoing bombardment of Palestine under the microscope. The fallout has now turned up something extraordinary: As first reported by 404 Media, Twitch has been silently blocking new users from both Israel and Palestine ever since October 7, 2023. When this became public, Twitch almost instantly issued a mea culpa and a course correction:

«We deeply regret this unacceptable miss, and the confusion it has caused. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks, we temporarily disabled sign ups with email verification in Israel and Palestine,» said the Twitch support account. «We did this to prevent uploads of graphic material related to the attack and to protect the safety of users.»

Twitch does have good reason for an abundance of caution, because the instantaneous nature of streaming means that such platforms have been used to broadcast awful content. The Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019, during which 51 people were killed and 89 injured, were partially livestreamed on Facebook. In May 2022, Payton Gendron killed ten people and injured three in a racist attack at a grocery store in New York (11 of the 13 victims were Black), livestreaming the attack on Twitch.

There are many other examples that justify a platform like Twitch taking a proactive stance in the immediate context of real-world atrocities: Especially with October 7, 2023, where Hamas attackers used the accounts of victims to livestream footage on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

So the initial decision here makes sense. It just seems that, once the immediate context had passed, nobody