On February 13th, A body-painting streamer by the name of “Forkgirl” was banned from Twitch due to an alleged incident related to nudity. According to Forkgirl, however, there was no such incident. Following the wrongful ban, she took to Twitter to call out the streaming platform in a creative manner; She body-painted herself in one of Twitch’s earlier Twitter posts which requested that they be held accountable for their actions.
According to information that she gave Kotaku, she never shows her chest unless it has already been painted – a practice that follows Twitch’s guidelines. She also claimed that the only odd thing she experienced the day of her ban was a high viewership count. Because some of the viewers were trolling and claiming to report her in chat, she suspected that the ban was a result of their malicious efforts.
The body-painting community on Twitch has been at odds with a sect of gamer “puritans” who tend to constantly question why they are on the platform in the first place. Some trolls claim that body-painting is just glorified stripping and that all bans are justified. One of Forkgirl’s mods decided to take a stance against that viewpoint in her Twitter post.
Needless to say, his provocative comment earned him a good deal of push-back.
Drama aside, Twitch did overturn the ban and reinstate Forkgirl’s channel around 8 days after the ban, much to her relief. She posted the response she received from Twitch, allowing the community to take a peak into their reasoning on the matter.
Their follow-up further explained the initial ban and showed an appropriate amount of lenience upon examining both the context and Forkgirl’s intentions. Regarding handling controversial bans, this is a fantastic step in the right direction for the streaming platform. However, Forkgirl still insists that Twitch should clarify their expectations for body-painters.
Although the ban might not have been truly justified, the response that Twitch gave Forkgirl is exactly the kind of transparency that the entire community has been crying out for; So honestly – good on Twitch for making adjustments. From here, hopefully staff can keep up the good work by providing more specification for the body-painting community in their overall guidelines.
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