A Twitch streamer’s claim that he scammed people out of more than $200,000 to feed his gambling habit has created an uproar among users and drawn a response from the streaming platform this week.
Abraham Mohammed, also known as the streamer Sliker, revealed via his stream on Saturday that he got money from Twitch viewers and streamers after claiming he needed to borrow it to avoid financial issues, Kotaku reported.
He then said he actually intended to use the money to feed a gambling addiction to the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the website reported.
The revelation caused top streamers, including Devin Nash, Pokimane and Mizkif, to support plans for a boycott around the week of Christmas that would call on Twitch to make a statement about gambling streams and sponsorships.
Kotaku reported that Twitch content creators have contended that “rich creators promoted harmful content to young, impressionable fans” via the platform through gambling.
Twitch responded to the backlash and the possibility of a streamers’ boycott by announcing its plan to ban streaming of certain gambling sites on its platform.
The platform tweeted Tuesday that it planned to prohibit sites that include slots, roulette or dice games that “aren’t licensed either in the U.S. or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection.”
Twitch’s policy change is scheduled to take place Oct. 18.
Twitch said it plans to ban the streaming of sites such as Duelbits.com, Rollbit.com, Stake.com and Roobet.com, and may identify more sites going forward.
The policy change won’t affect sports betting, fantasy sports and poker, Twitch said.
Streamers such as Pokimane, who gathered more than 312,000 likes expressing support of a ban on gambling streams, wrote “we did it y’all” following the policy change Tuesday.
Nash, who emphasized that the ban was “NOT a gambling ban” in a Twitter thread, wrote that the policy change leaves room for gambling to continue to exist on Twitch.
“We will need to see the full effects of this policy update on October 18th. In its current wording, this isn’t even close to a luck-based gambling ban,” Nash wrote.
“We must hold Twitch accountable as a platform to do the right thing, since they only seem to respond to extraordinary pressure.”
This is NOT a gambling ban. Headline readers are getting this wrong. Twitch doesn’t say they are banning luck-based gambling – ONLY certain websites that “aren’t licensed in the U.S.” – Unfortunately, this leaves plenty of room for gambling to remain on the website come Oct. 18th pic.twitter.com/99s2A7Hzd0
— Devin (@DevinNash) September 20, 2022
Source by www.huffpost.com
