Hasan Piker Banned From Twitch

Hasan Piker is caught up in a DMCA dispute.

By Ashley Turner

Streaming star Hasan Piker recently faced his fourth ban on Twitch. Piker has over 2 million followers on Twitch, where he is an immensely popular content creator, winning the YouTube Streamys award in the News category on Dec. 4. Despite regularly streaming discussions, playing games, and reacting to content, his broadcast abruptly ended on Dec. 6. Instead, viewers were presented with a message that said, "Content from this channel has been removed at the request of the copyright holder." Piker claimed the DMCA strike resulted from a personal takedown request from Censored.TV, a right-wing subscription channel that hosts conservative political commentators like Gavin McInnes.

Piker had previously checked out Kanye "Ye" West's latest interview on the self-described "#1 MAGA network." The 40-minute video featured Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes as Censored.TV's McInnes, Vice's former co-founder, and founder of the fascist street gang The Proud Boys, unsuccessfully attempted to "prevent[ing] Ye West from becoming an antisemitic [and] a Nazi." After showing Censored.TV content briefly on stream, then reacting to and dissecting it, Piker received a copyright infringement claim. As a result of this claim, Twitch suspended the star's account.

Piker shared the email he received from Twitch explaining the ban, which revealed the copyrighted claimant was Censored.TV. The streamer used Twitter to mock the resultant copyright strike with "lmao." As he revealed in a follow-up tweet, Censored.TV's chief technology officer Ray Aguilar had apparently personally issued the takedown. As part of the email, Aguilar claimed that the original video, Saving Ye: The Ye Interview, "belongs to Censored.TV." His account was also suspended for 48 hours, and his channel now has one copyright strike. In his initial tweet, he threw a jab at Aguilar, writing, "Lmao, the free speech defender's own CTO himself issued the takedown (just for my channel btw)."

In another pointed message, the Twitch political commentator continued, "These nazis sure love talking about free speech, only to use the most abused copyright mechanism to takedown someone covering and criticizing their silly ideas. Absolutely pathetic." More than 13,000 people liked his tweet within an hour. Piker's fourth ban was to last the entire 48 hours, until Dec. 8. Fast forward just a day, and he was unbanned. Just 24 hours after Twitch's email explaining his suspension for two days, the Amazon-owned platform unbanned the Fear& podcast host. While Piker has yet to respond to his early reinstatement as of this writing, he will likely return to streaming on his channel soon. This ban was less lengthy than those he notoriously received in 2019 for using the term "cracker," making harsh remarks about the 9/11 attacks, and driving while using streaming equipment.

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