It happened again: Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, Twitch’s top political commentator, just got hit with another ban hammer. However, this time, it’s not because he called white people “cracker”. Instead, it was due to apparent copyright infringement for watching an interview with rapper-turned-antisemite Kanye West on his livestream.
Kanye West, now known as Ye, has been going on a Nazi sympathizer tour as of late, making appearances at outlets like Alex Jones’ Infowars and Piers Morgan’s Uncensored to espousing harmful, racist myths about Jewish people and even saying “Hitler did a lot of good.” Just to give one example of the xenophobia Ye’s been professing: In a viral clip from his Infowars interview, where he showed up in a full face mask, Ye openly admitted to a “love” of Hitler, heavily emphasising the words “love” and “Hitler” by dragging out the vowel sounds. He’s been doing stuff like this for months now, with each appearance somehow worse than the last. It’s very yikes.
Considering HasanAbi, one of Twitch’s most popular livestreamers (he just won the YouTube Streamys award in the News category on December 4) is a political commentator, of course he would check out Ye’s latest interview on the self-described “#1 MAGA network” Censored.TV. The interview featured Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes as Censored.TV’s Gavin McInnes — the former Vice co-founder, and founder of fascist street gang The Proud Boys — helplessly tried, and spectacularly failed, at his originally stated goal of “prevent[ing] Ye West from becoming an antisemitic [and] a Nazi.”
While McInnes did attempt to counter-argue against Ye’s overt racism, the 40-minute video, in truth, was nothing more than the three men making jokes about the Jewish population and denying the Holocaust. “This is a Christian country that needs to be ran by Christian leaders,” said Ye.
Apparently, HasanAbi rebroadcasting this video during his Twitch broadcast was ban-worthy. The streamer took to Twitter to “lmao” the resulting copyright strike. In a follow-up tweet displaying the Twitch email he’d received, HasanAbi showed that Censored.TV’s chief technology officer Ray Aguilar had apparently issued the takedown himself. Aquilar claimed that the original video, titled Saving Ye: The Ye Interview, “belongs to Censored.TV.” The email also stated that HasanAbi’s account was suspended for 48 hours, and his channel now has one copyright strike on it.
In an email to Kotaku, a Twitch representative directed us to the Amazon-owned company’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notification Guidelines and DMCA & Copyright FAQ support pages.
“DMCA (aka copyright-related) suspensions actually aren’t related to our safety team since they are not violations of Twitch’s rules nor is processing them in our control,” the representative said in a brief statement to Kotaku. “They are violations of the United States’ copyright law DMCA, which applies to all services such as Twitch.”
Kotaku reached out to Censored.TV and HasanAbi for comment.
HasanAbi has been in hot water in the past. Last year, the internet absolutely lost its shit when he bought a $US3 million ($AU4.46 million) house in West Hollywood. The same thing happened this past February right after he picked up a $US200,000 ($AU297,000) Porsche Taycan. While HasanAbi may have been absolved of his “cracker” infringement, being gifted “The Pass” from snack food manufacturer Wheat Thins, I’m not sure if there’s any sort of recourse when white supremacists seek to weaponize the protection of free speech. More than anything, though, I don’t know if there’s any turning around for Ye.
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