Streamer and cosplayer Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa appeared to violate the Twitch Terms of Service yesterday when she lied to an employee about broadcasting from inside a store.
The alleged infraction occurred during an IRL shopping stream with two of her chat moderators. The group walked into a clothing store to continue their stream but were questioned by an employee.
“Are y’all videotaping in here?” the employee said off screen.
“Oh, we’re just video chatting, is that okay?” Amouranth said.
The employee said that if it was nothing more than a video chat, the group could carry on.
While this appears to be a very minor white lie to highlight, it seemed to be in clear violation of Twitch’s Terms of Service (ToS).
i. create, upload, transmit, distribute, or store any content that is inaccurate, unlawful, infringing, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, harassing, threatening, abusive, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable;
Twitch TOS Ch. 9, Sec. 1
Since the employee implied that video recording (and therefore, streaming) was against the store’s rules, paired with Amouranth’s dishonest statement that she was only “video chatting,” this incident appears to be “invasive of privacy or publicity rights.”
Amouranth received a brief 24-hour ban from Twitch in May 2018 for breaking the same rule of streaming on private property without permission when she broadcast from her gym. Again, she lied to staff questioning her by saying she wasn’t recording and instead was Skyping a trainer.
In that incident, she was escorted out after the staff expressed concerns about other gym-goers appearing on-camera without their knowledge.
But Amouranth had streamed from the gym on multiple occasions by that point. In one instance, she had even put another patron on camera without their consent and mocked them from behind their machine.
The most recent clip quickly rose to the top of r/LivestreamFail with the majority of comments displaying skepticism that any type of punishment or suspension will be given to her.
A longstanding conspiracy theory within the Twitch community is that female streamers are held to a different set of rules than male streamers, with women receiving more leniency. For every single instance of a male streamer receiving a suspension for violating the ToS, the conspiracy alleges, a female streamer would have to commit that same infraction on multiple occasions before she received the same punishment.
Most of the theorists don’t necessarily blame the streamers for the perceived double standard since they’re simply playing by the rules as they’re applied to them. Instead, they criticize the Twitch staff in charge of disciplinary decisions for appearing to be too friendly and cozied up to those streamers to be able to make objective rulings.
Supporters of this theory will use situations like the one that led to male streamers Mizkif and Esfand receiving seven-day bans while a female streamer involved in the incident got no punishment, despite them arguably committing the same infraction.
The temporary suspension in 2018 was only for the last stream she did from the gym, which became another point of argument for skeptics who suggested each instance of the disallowed streaming should’ve counted as its own infraction.
If Twitch does conclude that yesterday’s incident violates its ToS, Amouranth will very likely receive more than a 24-hour ban due to her past infraction.
The VOD containing the footage in question has since been deleted from Amouranth’s channel, confirming that if nothing else, she’s aware of the bad light the footage presented her in.
