Twitch Confronts His Role in #MeToo Reckoning Streaming


However, a couple of weeks after speaking, one of his channel moderators, passing through Snookville, wrote him a message warning him about Earney’s alleged behavior towards women. The moderator said he saw Earney bring several women, promising Twitch streamers, in and out of her room at conventions, even after telling another woman that he would see her. “She didn’t yell ‘abuse of power’ at me,” Avery says of her thinking at the time. “It was like, ‘cheat and be a jerk.'”

Since then, Avery says, his mind has changed. She says that she later learned that throughout their relationship, he was sending flirtatious and sexual messages to other applicants or small viewers. “That seems a little predatory,” she says. “He specifically uses his power with smaller streamers that are trying to increase his number of followers, rather than streamers that are more at his level.” When they broke up, she says, he started dating another promising streamer.

Earney confirmed that these events occurred via email to WIRED.

Avery posted a post Saturday about her relationship with Earney. Throughout the weekend, other women also publicly accused Earney of behavior ranging from awkward flirting to crossing sexual boundaries. Earney announced Sunday that he would discontinue his networks “indefinitely,” in a post titled “One Game.” He apologized for his “excessively sexual and flirtatious behavior.” “Regardless of when something you see is said to have happened, I want you to believe them. [the accusers]”He wrote.” What is obvious is that this behavior has continued throughout my career and I directly benefited from it sexually, while people on the receiving end were negatively affected. “

In an email to WIRED, Earney denied that his behavior was abusive or harassing, and called any suggestion “completely false.” Regarding the claims that he looked for promising streamers, Earney told WIRED that he “does not consider the ‘streamer’ aspect to be relevant here. I never associated sexual behavior with growth or improvement of the canal.”

On Wednesday night, after days of protests, Twitch removed Earney’s status and partner channel, along with the channels of other accused streamers: BlessRNG, Dreadedcone, Warwitch and 21wolv, three of whom responded to the allegations on against him. (A global Twitch emotion has been removed from BlessRNG’s face.)

In a post on its website also released on Wednesday, Twitch says they are “reviewing every case that has come to light as quickly as possible, while ensuring proper due diligence.” Twitch adds that, “In many of the cases, the alleged incidents occurred outside of Twitch,” and noted that some of those cases will need to be reported to “the appropriate authorities who are best placed to carry out a more comprehensive indictment.” Twitch declined to comment on WIRED’s question about its responsibility for off-platform streamer behavior after they get a hearing on it, and has shared no plans on whether to investigate the streamers it grants status to. of “partners”.

In interviews with WIRED, the women who reported abuse also described larger structural factors in the Twitch broadcast community that may contribute to a toxic environment. “I’ve said this for so many years,” says Natalie “ZombiUnicorn” Casanova, a Twitch streamer with 220,000 followers who shared her own accusations of sexual misconduct involving a top streamer. (The transmitter called her accusations false.) “We lag behind the rest of the entertainment industry in the way women are treated.”

About half of the players are women. Game culture, however, has been steeped in the traps of traditional masculinity for decades, from the war games that inspired Dungeons and Dragons to military simulations of Call of Duty. Games’ reputation as a male-dominated cultural tide is due in part to ad campaigns, not who plays. Kids with pocket money are a marketing demographic, and initially they were attacked by game companies like Nintendo. Over time, this children’s club demo ad grew stronger, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – just for kids. aura nights, Ventrilo voice chat servers full of men Counter-Strike players

.