On Oct. 21, Twitch banned five streamers for 30 days who had appeared on a TwitchCon panel for the “Ayyrabs” podcast the month prior.
The streamers — Vio, CapriSunnPapi, Fr0gan, Raffoulticket, and DenimsTV — shared their thoughts on a live-streamed panel at the convention in San Diego in September. On the panel, they placed popular creators on a tier list ranking who is “Arabic enough” to be allowed to say “habibi,” an Arabic term of endearment.
The tiers ranged from the top tier of “Arab” to the lowest tier of “Loves Sabra,” which panelists said referred to a popular grocery store brand of hummus named Sabra. The panelists said they believe Sabra to be a bad version of the classic Arabic dish, and people who love Sabra should not be allowed to say the word habibi.
However, Sabra is also a term for a Jewish person born in Israel. Though the panelists did not discuss this version of the word, pro-Israel influencers have accused the panel of using Sabra in a coded way to imply antisemitism. The full panel hosted by the Ayyrabs can still be watched on YouTube.
The five banned streamers did not respond to a request for comment via email. However, after the ban, some of the banned streamers, like Raffoulticket, shared their thoughts on social media.
Frogan shared her disappointment on X. She specifically criticized the length of the ban, referring to how Twitch streamer Asmongold received only a two-week suspension for saying he didn’t care that Palestinian civilians were being murdered and calling them “terrible people” from an “inferior culture.”
“30-day ban for saying people like bottom-of-the-barrel hummus but other people get 2 WEEKS for advocating for the genocide of Palestinians,” Frogan tweeted.
The September panel went relatively unnoticed until Oct. 19, when news broke that Twitch had “inadvertently” disabled new users in Israel and Palestine from creating accounts via email verification on the platform for over a year.
Twitch wrote in an apology statement that the change was intended to temporarily “prevent uploads of graphic material” following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
“We deeply regret this unacceptable miss, and the confusion it has caused,” the statement read. “We’ve fixed the issue, meaning all affected users can sign up with email verification.”
Leading up to and following the apology, pro-Israel influencers and the Israeli media have tried to use the sign-up error to argue the platform is guilty of antisemitism.
In the leadup to the apology, social media users also started to unearth clips of panelist Frogan, who is a vocal pro-Palestine advocate. In one clip, which was viewed 27 million times on X, Frogan said that she “had no pity for any fucking soldiers,” adding, “I hope you get PTSD.”
In a statement on X, the streamer (who is also a moderator for political commentator Hasan Piker) admitted that “the beginning of the clip was worded poorly” and that she “could have talked about these topics in a more sensitive way.”
Pro-Israel influencers poured more fuel on the fire, with creator Ethan Klein attempting to argue that Frogan’s TwitchCon panel was antisemitic in a viral video.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a controversial group that frames itself as a bulwark against oppression but actually has a consistent pro-Israel bias, posted on X that they had spoken to Twitch staff “concerning incidents on the social media platform… and/or involving Twitch streamers in the past week.”
In a statement to Passionfruit, the ADL shared that the incidents it referred to in its tweet were the TwitchCon panel and that “Twitch banned all new sign-ups from Israel for a year.”
The ADL also pointed to another separate incident where Twitch streamer Hasan Piker interviewed a Yemeni “pirate,” who is accused of being a Houthi militant, while Piker compared the pirate “to Anne Frank.”
“We are regularly in touch with all of our tech company partners, especially around incidents as egregious as the ones we are talking about here,” an ADL spokesperson said.
The ADL didn’t comment on whether their conversation with Twitch led to these streamers being banned, but the timing does seem suspicious.
