Twitch will be banning gambling streams
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In the near future, Twitch will start banning streams that feature online gambling on it. Click here to learn more about this banning, and why it came to be.
This call to ban gambling from Twitch did not just happen out of nowhere. It all started when some of Twitch’s biggest streamers, like Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, and Hasan Piker, confronted a fellow streamer, Abraham Jehad “Sliker” Mohammed. In their Discord call (which was also streamed), they confronted Sliker about his gambling problem. As it turns out, Sliker was scamming money from fans, friends, and other streamers to fuel his gambling habit. Sliker started gambling with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skins back in 2017 until it escalated to the real-life gambling he was doing now. Sliker admitted to his actions and apologized to his fans about it.
This started the #TwitchStopGambling movement. Big creators like Pokimane started rallying behind the hashtag, asking Twitch to ban gambling from the platform. Slots, at the time of this article’s writing, is the tenth most viewed streaming category with around 54,100 viewers. This was lower than its highest rank at around 7th a few days ago. The increase in the number of gambling streams happened thanks to the various sponsorships from gambling websites. To help drive their point home, these big streamers also planned to boycott Twitch during the Christmas period. Because Christmas is the peak season for ads, this plan could hurt Twitch financially.
Perhaps as a response to this trend, Twitch released its own statement regarding gambling on the website.
In their tweet, Twitch mentioned they will be updating their steaming policy on October 18, 2022. In the policy update, Twitch aims to ban the streaming of any gambling sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games. They are also specifically banning sites that are not licensed in the US, as well as those that don’t provide enough protection to their users. Banned sites include Stake, Rollbit, Duelbits, and Roobet, with more on the way. Twitch clarified, however, that sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker can stay. Only time can tell if this will be enough to prevent other people from ending up like Sliker.
