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.
These kind of IP range blocks tend to hurt the people they intended to help.
(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.)
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.
edit: oh yeah forgot about the racial tier list platform at a sponsored official event lol
Jayzus, I don’t want to invoke Godwin, but it sort of invokes itself…
Surely we can engage in this topic without resorting to blatantly inflammatory language.
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
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.
Probably just something done by a single dev.
So unlikely has anything to do with a recent ban.
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.
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...
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.
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...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds...
