Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli IP's

https://twitter.com/dancantstream/status/1847991191221989620

by drones • 2 years ago

73 52 2 years ago

talldayo• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Geolocation does not use GPS, it uses IP addresses.

hobobaggins• 2 years ago

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

tuyguntn• 2 years ago

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

dtquad4• 2 years ago

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.

Seattle35032• 2 years ago

Is there a source for this?

bbor• 2 years ago

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

dtquad4• 2 years ago

Russian streamers are still on Twitch including pro-war Russian streamers who did some rather tasteless streams on the first days of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Also, the obvious hypocrisy of not banning accounts from Sudan, Ukraine, Russia, etc. doesn’t help their image.

There's a very large difference here. They know what decision about those will get them into trouble and what decisions won't.

Or rather, it's also obvious what decisions will get a large US company into trouble on the context of the Israel wars. Every single one of them, whatever direction they are biased into.

trissylegs• 2 years ago

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

dadoum• 2 years ago

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

lrae• 2 years ago

The block seems to be in effect since at least May: https://x.com/Forceultraomega/status/1795189735297605635

So unlikely has anything to do with a recent ban.

weatherlite• 2 years ago

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).

pityJuke3• 2 years ago

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?

dtquad4• 2 years ago

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

pityJuke3• 2 years ago

Indeed. There’s a whole ‘nother controversy on the platform (which the tweet poster is a part of), but that’s far less clear cut than those two.

timeon• 2 years ago

Yeah, for many people in the US, vision is usually tunneled to 2 sides. But out there are many sides.

Seattle35032• 2 years ago

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

covercash4• 2 years ago

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…

WesolyKubeczek4• 2 years ago

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

covercash4• 2 years ago

If we’re getting specific, a botnet in the region creating accounts might trigger a precautionary lock down like this.

_DeadFred_• 2 years ago

Up until recently support responded to tickets of people asking why they couldn't sign up telling them they were forbidden to join. So it was at least semi-official and allowed as a reason for closing support tickets.

kuschku• 2 years ago

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.

dtquad4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Rumors say it was explicitly blocked on an alleged github push

lampeli• 2 years ago

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

WesolyKubeczek4• 2 years ago

Racial tier list?

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

throwaway19972• 2 years ago

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.

heyheyhouhou• 2 years ago

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...

wslh• 2 years ago

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...

Hikikomori2• 2 years ago

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

dzhiurgis• 2 years ago

On company time

WesolyKubeczek4• 2 years ago

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.

covercash4• 2 years ago

I imagine @dang is pretty on top of clapping antisemitic comments on this platform, he’s not one to mess around.

I worry that softening the definition of antisemitism by saying things border on it is ultimately weakening the severity of the accusation long term. Like bigot and pedo, antisemite will soon be relegated to just another empty accusation before long.

Toaster-King• 2 years ago

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?

gcau• 2 years ago

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.

Hikikomori2• 2 years ago

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...

kalkin2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

kalkin2• 2 years ago

In context the thing about a purple-haired person is about a hypothetical Twitch trust-and-safety employee, not about Netanyahu.

cherry_tree• 2 years ago

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

Twitch blocks creating new accounts from Israeli IP's

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