Amazon owned Twitch un-bans Trump’s channel suspended for ‘hateful conduct’

[whohit]Amazon owned Twitch un-bans Trump’s channel suspended for ‘hateful conduct’[/whohit]Twitch, the livestreaming platform, recently suspended President Donald Trump’s channel for “hateful conduct,” in what appeared to be the first deliberate suspension of one of Trump’s social media accounts.

The site, which is owned by Amazon, said two recent streams on Trump’s channel violated its rules. One stream was of a rebroadcasted 2015 campaign event in which Trump made comments about Mexico sending drugs, crime and rapists over the border. The other was of his recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he talked about a “very tough hombre” breaking into a woman’s house at 1 a.m.

“Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch,” a Twitch spokesperson said in a statement. “In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed.”

With its move, Twitch went further than other social media platforms. In recent months, some tech companies have become more proactive in handling speech issues by Trump and his supporters. Twitter began adding labels to some of the president’s tweets; Snap has said it will stop promoting Trump’s Snapchat account; and Reddit on Monday said it would ban “The_Donald” community, which had been a highly influential digital gathering place for Trump’s acolytes.

But unlike those efforts, Twitch directly clamped down on the president himself, temporarily shutting down his ability to post videos on a channel. The only other time Trump had one of his social media accounts suspended was by accident in 2017, when his Twitter account was unexpectedly disabled by a rogue contractor who was leaving Twitter that day.

Twitch now unbanned Trump’s account, which is available again.