Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli IP's

[pityJuke]

Twitch recently unbanned two rather anti-semitic individuals in the form of “FreshAndFit” and “sneako”, which makes this decision all the more perplexing. Do they want to appear as if they are anti-semitic?

[dtquad]

Worth pointing out that FnF and Sneako are actual far-right anti-semites and not just the generic left-wing pro-Palestine activists.

[Seattle3503]

I'm glad we miraculously re-discovered the value of free speech just in time for this most recent wave of antisemitism. /s

[kuschku]

A possible explanation might be an automated anti-botnet system running wild.

Israel and Palestine are an edge case with a comparatively small population and very active cyberwarfare groups, leading to a relatively high amount of bot traffic.

But even that's quite a stretch, as the error message suggests a country-wide block instead of blocking one or a few ISPs.

[dtquad]

A lot of pro-Palestinian online activism actually comes from the Israeli IP ranges. There are two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship inside Israel and they are free to do pro-Palestinian activism as long as it doesn't call for the destruction of Israel or supports groups listed as terror groups.

These kind of IP range blocks tend to hurt the people they intended to help.

[daedrdev]

Rumors say it was explicitly blocked on an alleged github push

[kalkin]

The Twitter account posting this seems a bit unhinged, with the snitch tagging of everyone from th ADL to the ACLU and the weird speculation about a "purple haired" person. I'm not inclined to take their description of the scope of the block at face value; is there a better source?

(Also, Twitch is within their rights to decide in which countries they offer their service, and there could be any number of reasons for that kind of decision.)

[invalidname]

FYI Purple haired person is the Israeli nickname for Netanyahu. He dyes his hair and it occasionally picks up a purple tint. It's silly and childish, there's plenty of horrible things to say about him other than his appearance.

It's not about Twitch having a right to block a country. It's stealth blocking which seems contradictory to their parent companies policy. There are a lot of complaints against Amazon in this regard e.g. an Amazon employee is a hostage in Gaza yet people aren't allowed to mention his name within Amazon. This is in stark contrast to nvidia which also has an employee hostage in Gaza.

[covercash]

What’s more likely, an Amazon owned company blocking Israeli accounts on moral/ethical grounds or some backend technical reason? My guess is the latter…

[WesolyKubeczek]

Or one employee being an activist and sneaking in a config change.

[lampeli]

I don't usually comment on here, I just lurk but this whole week has been super weird when it comes to twitch. Letting antisemites back on the platform, never punishing people literally spreading terrorist propaganda. Destiny (the streamer not the game) alleges that this block has been in place since october 13th of last year, but for now the only solid proof is that it has been in place since may of this year so take that with a grain of salt.

edit: oh yeah forgot about the racial tier list platform at a sponsored official event lol

[WesolyKubeczek]

Racial tier list?

Jayzus, I don’t want to invoke Godwin, but it sort of invokes itself…

[throwaway19972]

> Letting antisemites back on the platform, never punishing people literally spreading terrorist propaganda.

Surely we can engage in this topic without resorting to blatantly inflammatory language.

[hobobaggins]

Why would they do this? It's a political statement from Amazon?

[bbor]

Looks like they’ve been doing it since the start of the war, unless we have better source that it’s new than a tweet? I think it’s just coming up now because of twitch con related controversy.

Either way it appears to be an attempt to keep themselves out of the spotlight, controversy wise. Definitely not a political statement, if for no other reason than they haven’t issued any statements. Also, the title is understandable given the relative internet access rates, but the slightly more accurate one would be “Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli and Palestinian IPs”.

Seems like a way, way worse way to avoid controversy than simply banning war streamers, but who am I to say. Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.

ETA: whatever the reason is, it appears to be policy, not technical: https://x.com/not_JayVee/status/1848031193469501473

[dtquad]

The block was hardcoded into the source code on October 13, 2023. I think it would have been done by one of the ops teams if it was required by management.

Probably just something done by a single dev.

[weatherlite]

Amazon itself has worked just fine Israeli IPs and I assume Palestinians also. The fact the block was both for Israeli and Palestinians combined makes me think this actually wasn't an anti Israeli / anti Palestinian decision. It was something else (official explanation by Twitch was that after the October 7th massacres they wanted to prevent new sign ups from the region uploading graphic massacre content which is believable to me).

[trissylegs]

Maybe to stop idf or hamas soldiers posting videos of violence. There’s plenty of cases of that being posted to X. twitch being realtime would have a much harder time blocking or removing it

[tuyguntn]

maybe excessive fake/bot account creations, which might be impacting quality of discussions

[dadoum]

I have no sources backing this, but I think it could be related to the ban of a big streamer recently who made a "controversial" stance about what's happening in Gaza [0] and that could have lead to some people mass creating accounts on Twitch (that would not be unheard of when that kind of events happen, but again, I haven't seen any report of that happening).

[0]: https://x.com/HasanabiProd/status/1845889127629176966

[cherry_tree]

Twitch has resolved the issue affecting both Israeli and Palestinian users per their latest tweet: https://x.com/TwitchSupport/status/1848191418377830708

[gcau]

There is context that makes this not just look like a simple technical issue. Twitch promotes a certain twitch streamer who is openly and brazenly supportive of hamas terrorists, and has said some very evil things, and spread a lot of disinformation, by any measure violating many rules. Then there is the 2 people being unbanned that others mentioned, both of which doing similar things. Interestingly, the first person I mentioned is far-left, and these 2 people (atleast one of them) are far right.

So it definitely goes beyond just looking like an innocent error in my eyes. I can't think of any logical reason whatsoever they'd ban israelis intentionally.

[heyheyhouhou]

It is well known that Israel uses botnets and user-controlled fake accounts to steer public opinion in social media.

Reddit, youtube, instagram and lots of media outlets are flooded with pro-israeli propaganda or massive downvoting to any critizism against Israel. Also here in hacker news...

[Toaster-King]

Do you have any evidence that Israeli-controlled accounts were operating on Twitch (a video-game livestreaming company), and that this required an entire country-level IP block after october 7th?

[WesolyKubeczek]

Here on HN I tend to see the opposite: lots of staunch anti-israelism, sometimes bordering on plain old antisemitism, along with these statements like yours. I have showdead and showflagged enabled, yet I don’t see the flood of propaganda you keep talking about.

[wslh]

> It is well known that Israel...

It is well known that any cybersecurity aware country... here I point to some papers/articles [1][2][3] just as a reference of the modus operandi, not to isolate a particular country.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.07109

[2] https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/gf7jb/download

[3] https://www.foi.se/download/18.6b6fc4521690ffa2022169/155076...

[Hikikomori]

Hey now, the ones on hackernews probably do it for free on their own time.

[dtquad]

@dang the username "pajeets" is a racist term against people from India and nearby countries.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pajeet

[biimugan]

For anyone that's confused, there was an event at TwitchCon where some streamers (including one Jewish person) created a tier list. The tier list ranked other streamers according to whether they should be given a "pass" to say the word 'habibi'. The categories included things like 'Arab', 'Arab-coded', and at the bottom 'Loves Sabra'. Sabra, in this case, is a well-known brand of (supposedly not good) hummus (I don't like even good hummus, so I don't know). There's a conspiracy theory (subscribed to by OP) that 'loves Sabra' was actually some kind of code-phrase for a Jewish person because there's a similar sounding Hebrew word that refers to a Jew born in Israel. This led to a lot of people getting very mad.

I say this is a conspiracy theory because if you listen to even five minutes of this (pretty unfunny, admittedly) panel, it's abundantly clear that they are indeed talking about bad hummus, not Jews. In fact, they rank a few known Jewish streamers as Arab or Arab-coded -- i.e. allowed to say 'habibi' -- and vice versa. And, as mentioned, one of the panelists is also Jewish.

There's also the fact that I don't think most people would know this Hebrew word, but would definitely have heard of the brand. So if this is some attempt to promote antisemitism, it seems pretty lousy. If this was an attempt at antisemitism, it also doesn't make much sense to single out only Jews born in Israel. Antisemitism doesn't make this distinction (at least that I've ever heard). It usually focuses exclusively on 'global cabals' and the 'new world order' and conspiracies of that nature.

[refulgentis]

I am predispositioned to agree with this wholeheartedly but the member of a civil society in me has to draw a line at conspiratorial suggestions in the last sentence.

I gotta point out that sort of thing isn't appropriate even in my in-group, so I can make fun of it when the out-group does it.

If I were more honest and had more time, I'd have the courage to suggest that even though I assumed the first part is true, I shouldn't have, especially given the overall standards of evidence seem low.

[talldayo]

Also feasible that nationwide GPS spoofing in Israel makes it harder to automatically approve new account creations. If Israel is redirecting GPS systems to neighboring territories (eg. Syria or Iran) then it's pretty easy to see why those countries would be banned.

[aduffy]

Geolocation does not use GPS, it uses IP addresses.

[Hikikomori]

Can recommend the Bad Hasbara podcast if you want to listen to a sane discussion on Israeli propaganda, only a tiny amount of penis jokes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds...