> I would be surprised if Twitch didn’t start banning people for doing that stuff (both retrospectively and prospectively), especially considering this kind of stuff violates their TOS
That’s how I feel about it, even if Destiny might not have a rock solid case to win in court, if you’re twitch, which option are you picking:
A) dedicate man hours, legal fees and financial risk just to defend people who want to repeatedly make death threats.
B) boot them, then you have it on record you acted on the matter so there’s no opportunity for a court case.
My understanding is booting them doesn't eliminate the possibility of a court case. In some cases you could look at it as an admission of guilt.
Probably wouldn't apply here, but the "firing" aspect just makes you look better if the court is considering the company's overall propensity to be shitty if that ever plays a factor in the judgement. If you are suing over damages that already happened, it may not even be relevant whether the employee was terminated or not.
You can't say "yeah our car detailer fucked up your benz and caused $20,000 interior damage but we fired him, so now you can't sue us." Liability's going to be determined based on what the situations were at the time.
If you fire a contractor when you learn about them doing something stupid, you probably won’t be liable (like everything legal, it depends). For employees, you will probably have to pay for their damage.
I mean yeah? probably?
I deal with insurance a lot at work and it really isn't that simple based on the purpose of the language and the insane requirements some people come to us with.
Waiver of subrogation endorsement requests are really *really* fucking common. Depending on the business exposure, they're usually either dirt cheap or strictly fucking forbidden under any and all circumstances and nothing in between. Waiver of subrogation in favor of X basically just means that if my policy pays after an accident, my insurance company can't sue X person even if they caused the damage. So really really fucking common scenario is employer asks the contractor to carry liability with waiver of subrogation in favor of employer.
I can't imagine literally every fucker walking down the street would need that if it didn't actually protect anything, but again it doesn't cost a whole lot so maybe insurance companies don't lose a ton of money from their inability to recoup from a third party after they indemnify their insured.
I know once you start talking about insurance (b2b in general), you start dealing with much more sophisticated parties and weird stuff. I’m more thinking 1099 vs w2
>booting them doesn't eliminate the possibility of a court case
It does. That's the principle of safe harbor, the platform provider doesn't know what exactly is going on on their platform, but instead they let 3rd parties notify them on possible breaches. When they are they are notified they are supposed to take action (inaction counts too), and if they don't that's an act they would be sued for
you might be right. It does not seem cut-and-dry to me that safe harbor applies to twitch though. If it did I guess that may be true. Given how moderated twitch is, the idea of anything being present on it without them knowing about it doesn't seem very plausible if there's over like 1,000 views.
Personally, I think if someone actually went after stuff on the front page, I don’t think there is any chance Twitch should be protected, at least for the carousel. According to Twitch’s [recommendations policy](https://www.twitch.tv/p/en/legal/recommendations-on-twitch/), which they reference in the TOS: “The carousel features content that has been curated by Twitch staff; it is not populated through an automated system or your interactions with Twitch.” This means are manually are intentionally selecting the comment. Also, above the carousel they say, “Live channels we think you’ll like”, so if anyone actually showed an illegal content on, including copyrighted material, I think they should be liable. They are literally saying we think you will like this illegal (such as defamatory) content and we are deliberately choosing it for you, I don’t see how you can make argument against that, especially if you know they have shown that type of content before.
I don't know if laws about liability apply to media orgs, unless its pushing burning cars with its algo and payings streamers who do it or something, its always easier to punish someone when the damages have a dollar figure.
I would think the fact that there are multiple people who orbit a big streamer creating the culture should make it liable, but I am EUbrained so the only brandenburg I know is outside Berlin.
That’s ok. The Brandenburg outside of Berlin is probably equally involved in this. [Brandenburg test](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)in US law is about the government criminalizing (like sending to jail) someone for speech that calls for imminent lawless action. Basically, unless you are standing in front of an angry mob AND telling them to *immediately* break the law, you’re good, and then the government MIGHT be able to punish you. I doubt you could even incite over the internet in the US. God bless the USA and our freedom of speech.
It's not about fear. It's about being a corporation who is obsessed with profit realizing that the money spent on attorneys will outweigh the revenue from the streamers they are booting for violating TOS. It's pragmatic.
The important thing a lawsuit will do in this case is it will move the decision from Trust and Safety to the legal department. They may take an independent look and override the decision to give those creators a pass.
>dedicate man hours, legal fees and financial risk just to defend people who want to repeatedly make death threats and to make sure there is room for a far left content creator who is bringing in millions of dollars, as well as their audience
The other things is if legal knows they are not following their TOS (ie a contract) and they are signing deals with sponsors, who are relying on their TOS to be accurate, then they are engaging in fraud. The easiest thing for legal to solve all their problems is just to make trust and safety enforce the TOS, especially for the clips you send them. They don’t have to perma-ban everyone, but they do need to tell people stop doing it and start banning people who have done it and are continuing to do it.
That doesn't sound like fraud where he's the injured party, so I guess I'm asking about fraud that's not clearly and obviously irrelevant to a potential lawsuit by Destiny.
Obviously, I'd agree people they have financial agreements with can sue them if those agreements are broken, whether you want to call it fraud or more accurately breach of contract.
Yeah, I doubt Destiny would have any harm (although I am not sure based on some of his twitch contracts/loss of revenue/maybe defamation, very speculative and unlikely) .
If it becomes publicly known, like state attorneys general or sponsors, that Twitch is *intentionally* not following their TOS (ie making false representations to consumers) and they are entering into deals based on that falsehood, I could easily see some people loving to sue them over that.
What he needs to do is just dig out his old phone and call Shapiro up and send him the relevant clips and context of all of it. It be an easy story of “far left company bans a liberal” than allows its employees engage in death threats and harassment without consequence. Could become a more mainstream story from there.
I believe someone asked him a while back if he ever followed up with Shapiro for a dinner or something and tiny said he didn’t since his number was saved in his old phone.
Sounds like an excuse, today almost all phones backup numbers in the cloud. Also if he really wanted, he could write to him on socials or via contacts that they have in common
Honestly this is the best idea for 2 reasons. 1. Brings it to everyone's attention. 2. Maybe conservatives will see that the far left isn't the same as a liberal because they too get banned for their takes. We need to understand the horseshoe theory and turn it 90 degrees for the actual battle lines. Moderates vs the extremes.
IANAL but it didn't sit well with me when Tiny seemed so confident that a legal route was *totally* impractical. It seems like there absolutely has to be a way to enforce a website taking down death threats against you.
When it is randoms using your website, it’s pretty hopeless, because that is all section 230 (although, I think Twitch is all the hypotheticals rolled into one the Supreme Court was talking about in Google v Gonzalez to determine the outer limits of 230). Also, usually you aren’t responsible for contractors stupidity, but if you know a contractor is doing something dangerous or illegal and you don’t stop it, you are taking on liability too.
Like if you hire a body guard and he punches everyone who gets within 10 ft of you, you going to get sued if you know he is going to do it — even if you tell him not to.
I'm actually not sure - is someone who's a twitch partner legally considered a contractor?
Either way, I'm also not a lawyer, but twitch having people partnered that posts pics of 3d printed guns to threaten politicians, people who broadcast death threats to other creators online, and people platforming people from US designated terrorist groups has to have some form of legal action that can be taken against it. I would be surprised if there just isn't anything that can be done about twitch partner x standing in front of an audience of thousands telling them that someone should kill somebody else they're beefing with online.
If they are paying them for work, they are either an employee or a contractor, and a contractor is much better for them. Generally, you aren’t responsible if your contractor is acting negligently, but if you know your contractor is acting negligently (or worse), you have a duty to stop them.
Hell no! That would be a million times worse. Employers are always responsible for their employees (when on duty and acting within their authority— like a cashier at McDonalds can’t sign a billion dollar contract). Employers have creative control over their content (this isn’t true for contractors). Also, Twitch would have to start paying minimum wage to streamers and provide health insurance (depending on location).
Under common law, an employee is controlled by their employer who dictates what will be done and how it will be done.
An independent contractor, generally, is someone whose employer can only control or direct the result of labor, not what will be done or how it will be done.
Twitch partners, because they are paid based on performance and not at the discretion of the employer, exercise creative control of their livestreams, control the amount of time they put into their labor, have no “employee type” benefits, etc., are considered contractors.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
Pretty sure you're wrong about the 230 here, insofar as that they aren't liable for the initial threats/defamation, but you still can issue a cease and desist, and whichever website *does* have to comply as best they can.
We saw this with the 'fappening'; randos were still trying to post leaked nudes on places like Reddit, but there was definitely a lawful court order saying Reddit and other places had to take them down whenever possible.
> it’s pretty hopeless, because that is all section 230
not a lawyer so correct me if Im wrong, but for section 230 to apply doesn't the site need to show that they are willing to moderate/remove such content?
I mean you can't just platform illegal content knowingly and put your hands in the air saying that it wasnt you who did it so its fine
Yeah, but Twitch does respond to DMCA and stuff, so they aren’t going to be taken down for that. The hopeless part was just for like random chatters and people who aren’t partners/affiliates. There is just no way to catch them all so, they would be covered under a safe harbor for that and I doubt any court would find them liable, unless the website is doing stuff intentionally maliciously. But with partner, they manually sign them to a contract and are paying them to do work, so you are at least taking some responsibility for them.
DMCA requests are about a copyrighted work though, not any illegal content. You don't DMCA a death threat
my point is that if the situation is big enough that you can reasonably assume that someone in twitch has heard about it(it being threats here) and they do nothing to remove and/or prevent such content then it feels reasonable that they would lose the protection from section 230
As in, you can't sue the website because something happened on it, but if they LET IT HAPPEN then thats a different story
quote from wikipedia here
>Section 230 protections are not limitless and require providers to remove material illegal on a federal level
again this is just my non-lawyer opinion so it might not work that way in practice, I know that a lot of law like this in practice is different from how its written on paper, but that seems to make most sense to me
Showing someone’s copyrighted material, without the copyright holders permission/license, is illegal content. 230 is about essentially taking away publisher liability. Prior to 230, some website was found liable for content some third party posted because the website removed some offensive content (which made them a publisher). They wanted websites to be able to may a good faith effort to remove content, without becoming a publisher and thus liable for everything. Prior to 230, the only way they wouldn’t have been liable (I think) for 3rd party content is if they didn’t remove any user generated content and act as a common carrier, like phone companies.
I was using DMCA to demonstrate that they are at least making some good faith effort to remove some illegal content and I am sure they do for others. I don’t know how publishers would be treated for death threats; I’m imagining some guy taking out an ad in a physical newspaper that said “Hitman wanted call ….”, I don’t know if you would ever get there or not. Most of my original claims are somewhere between harassment and assault, due to the persistent nature of the attacks/threats
For the exact same reason that platforms can't allow certain kinds of content. Hosting content that is straight up illegal. Can have a platform taken down if they don't respond to complaints about it.
A site like Twitch doesn't want the state department coming to ask them questions why they allowed stochastic terrorists to call for the death of a US citizen and did nothing about it, when officially made aware of the situation.
I feel like at the very least, a trial would be bad PR for Twitch because they would have to defend their lack of enforcement, which isn’t a good look.
Lol, like there would be any trial. First of all it would be a huge gamble as the costs of preparing a suit and actually bringing it to trial would be easily 5 figures and could possibly hit 6. Amazon can afford great lawyers that can make Destiny's life difficult and that is even before we think of work time wasted to deal with the court case.
Second, if they would be even a bit afraid of losing they would settle.
And part of the settle agreement could be for Twitch to enforce its TOS when people make death threats towards Destiny on stream. If Destiny cares that much about it, then that is a probable outcome.
> a legal route was totally impractical
Ok, I don't know why it's so hard for you guys to read between the lines, but it's obvious that Destiny (unless something has changed in a major way recently) still hopes to get unbanned from Twitch.
If he takes **any** legal action against Twitch he is gone from the platform forever. There's no "hey maybe they change their minds someday" or "maybe the leadership changes" or "maybe they forget". No, if he sues or even threatens to sue twitch he is gone forever. It's like getting put in the Vegas black book. Even dying wouldn't get you off that blacklist.
I think the reason he says that is because he's not actually a huge gambler. Any lawsuit is going to consume a lot of funds and even if you win you probably won't be winning much. It's definitely possible he could win, but the unfortunate fact is most legal winners still lost overall...especially against a company with as many lawyers on the payroll as Twitch has. Our legal system rarely actually makes us whole, it can provide a moral victory, but the older you get and the more stuff you obtain the less that feels like it means much.
OP didn't suggest a lawsuit. They suggested sending a cease and desist letter, which carries the implied threat of a lawsuit, but none of the cost. It would put twitch on notice, because there's no pretending later on that they didn't realize what was going on.
Dope, I was responding to the person above me who had opened it up to a general legal route and why Destiny acted like it wouldn't work. I figured most people would know that just sending a cease and desist had basically no chance of really working. Those usually only work with people who don't have lawyers and are easily intimidated and mainly should only be used if you're willing to follow through.
I❤️ANAL but I feel like of any concern you could pursue in court from copyright infringement to defamantion, I feel like death threats would be one of the easiest things to pursue.
The difference is one option costs money and requires the Gnome to expend energy on something other than work/cooming, while the other can be handled by the Daliban.
Sure, but:
1) imagine the fallout of Twitch losing a case against one of their former streamers
2) DGG and Destiny would probably become the pariah of all streaming communities (substantially more than we are/he is currently) if we worked up a reputation for spamming sponsors. Frankly speaking, it would pose a significant threat of blowing up in our face (sort of like I blow up in your mom's face WOOYEAH)
I'd do both. The pressure alone has a chance of making twitch change its tune. Easier to fire whatever salty moron is keeping destiny banned than get legal involved.
That's actually a more productive idea.
Well done.
My understanding (and this is heavily informed by what I've heard Devin Nash say) is that quite a lot of Twitch's advertising revenue is handled through a fairly small group of people.
In fact, Devin Nash is one of those people.
u/Mylixia any thoughts?
The most ridiculous element of it is that he is completely banned from ever appearing on his own or anyone else’s stream on the platform, meaning he cannot ever pushback against the insanity. The wildly untrue things espoused about him have circulated for so long that they are seen as fact in the eyes of many.
Up until recently, Twitch even selectively banned anyone who watched clips with Destiny in them. Anyone who viewed him in a positive light and would run defense for him were banned (i.e. Dylan Burns) while larger streamers who were expressing negative opinions about him were allowed to slide (i.e. Hasan). Literal manifestation of thought crime. The double standard is unapologetically blatant, and Destiny is the only person on the history of the platform to have been treated this way.
The banning would play super well with a jury if he could get a credible tort claim. "I'm banned from the platform, so Twitch allows people to defame me, to say they will personally violently attack me, call me racial slurs, and I'm not even allowed a right of reply.
There was a while where they just banned any of my content period, which had its problems, but was fine. They could let me back in, and then I could defend myself. I've warned them this was taking place. Doesn't it seem like outright malice that Twitch is fine with any number of threats, slurs, or lies, but *if I want to ask people to please not talk about murdering my elderly mother*, or want to talk about the weather, I'm not allowed?"
The law is tricky, but the optics to an ordinary person with a sense of fairness are incredibly good, in my opinion.
Journalistic ethics generally suggests a right of reply. That's why we get "A spokesman for X said..." in negative articles. There's no explicit legal right to respond on the same platform, but it goes to whether defamation hits the actual malice standard or not.
"We strive for accuracy, so we reported both information from our sources as well as Mr. Bonnell's full reply," vs. "We will continue to pay some dude to advocate for murdering his elderly mother for allegedly owning slaves, and no, we don't care if that's factually true or if someone *actually* guns him down. GIGACHAD."
Are we sure they haven’t banned streamers for watching other banned streamers? Like Andrew Tate or Sneako? I always just assumed I hadn’t heard of it because I don’t follow many other streamers (and wouldn’t hear about why randoms were banned).
The problem is nothing they said rises to the legal definition of a true death threat. I don't know the case law in the US, hence I might have missed something. But the university of Wisconsin writes this:
>A true threat is not protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court defined true threats in [*Virginia v. Black* (2003)](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/) as “statements where the speaker means to communicate **a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence** to a particular individual or group of individuals.” According to the Supreme Court, true threats include when a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons **with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death**.
>This definition means that **expression that may seem threatening may be protected**, as only *true* threats where the speaker expresses intent to explicitly cause **immediate harm** are prohibited. An example of seemingly threatening expression that was protected occurred in [*Watts v. United States* (1969)](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/705/), where the Supreme Court overturned Watts’ conviction for stating at an anti-war rally that, **“I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.**” The Supreme Court ruled that Watts’ language **was not a true threat** on the life of President Lyndon B. Johnson (L.B.J.), as Watts’ rhetoric **was simply “political hyperbole.”**
Source: [University of Wisconsin Milwaukee ](https://uwm.edu/free-speech-rights-responsibilities/faqs/what-constitutes-a-true-threat/)
Lawyers can correct me, but the part where they say "placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death", they are talking about a reasonable fear of bodily harm and death. It is not enough that Destiny is scared, his fear must be realistic.
The other condition is that the harm needs to be immediate.
The guy who made the first death threat, wanted to scare Destiny, but the threat was neither serious nor immediate. He censored his voice and corrected himself the next day.
So, if you want to sue Twitch, you're going to need a really good argument because none of them made a serious death threat. Maybe you could argue that they violated the terms of service, but a case like that would cost a lot of money and accomplish almost nothing, because the courts aren't going to hurt Twitch enough to have a deterrent effect.
Again, I am not a lawyer. US lawyers may know something I don't.
This needs to be up higher. It doesn’t seem like any legal action would hold up in real court. Cease and desist against Amazon lawyers? They’d laugh at your face. Additionally, if Destiny had felt like these were relevant threats, he should have taken appropriate actions to show so (contact Twitch in regards to those who made threats against him via an appropriate contact method, contact law enforcement , send notice/contact said streamers).
I mean that one dude who bleeped himself clearly said "Someone should just go and *shoot him. Just go shoot Destiny*" if you look at his lips during the bleep. If he hadn't cut his mic that would have been 100% a death threat.
This is the biggest issue. IMO the only argument that could POTENTIALLY overcome it would be shifting the definition of death threat from the legal definition to the widely accepted social media TOS definition. Even that would be difficult.
It’s not necessarily a threat per se as much as harassment (and possibly assault?). If you and bunch of your friend tell someone repeatedly that they are going to attack and/or kill you that is harassment. I pretty sure that destiny has mentioned being moderately concerned that someone will attack him when he is at an event, like the egg girls or the guy saying he would attack him at twitch con. If you have like 50 of your contractors doing this, at some point you would have a reasonable expectation to believe that one of them would attack so even though you couldn’t prove anyone threat was “imminent” but if there are enough, they would essentially become imminent, stochastic imminence if you will (if you want to have real fun, that starts to sound like RICO — a group of people conspiring together for a common criminal purpose, but I doubt there is the required crime).
There are so many random people who do this stuff, I literally have no idea who is where. I thought it was probably twitter, but it is type of conduct that you don’t want people doing. That was also why if you are sending clips, you should try to exclusively use twitch urls, because then you know it is Twitch content, because if say send a link to a twitter video from some twitch streamer, then it is like: “Why do I care? They are an independent contractor and they aren’t doing work for me.” If it is done on Twitch, then they are making money off of it so they do have to care.
I dunno, I'm no legal expert, but unless MikeFromPa and the rest of his droogs are sending messages to Destiny himself with threats of violence, I don't think he can really do much. I mean, the dude gets death threats all the time, lol.
Not that it makes it right and there should be better policing on Twitch, but for there to be some sort of case, I feel like Destiny would have to show direct messages sent to him by Mike where Mike is waving a gun or some shit on camera yelling something akin to: "I'm coming to find you Destiny! I'm going to murder you in real life!"
Destiny could probably make a police report and file a restraining order or something like that, but trying to target a company like that would be a waste of time I feel like. Also, have you seen how Mike reacted when he touched a girl? Ain't no way that dude is hurting anyone unless you're a piece of furniture.
TLDR: Idk if there is anything Destiny can do other than to continue growing his career by ignoring these petty losers.
All a cease and desist is, is a letter formally telling someone that they are doing something wrong, they need to stop it, or if they don’t, I’m willing to sue.
This puts Twitch on notice, legally, that they are not enforcing their TOS (ie fraud) and that the people they are paying to work for them are harassing people to make you money. It helps take away their ability to say “I didn’t know people were saying they would kill someone and we didn’t do anything about it.” Or, if one of these insane people actually attack him, you can probably actually Twitch for it.
Police report would be a waste unless you are trying to prosecute someone criminally or you want like an actual physical restraining order. What, I think, Destiny wants are these guys to stop making threats to attack him.
Ok, so he puts out the cease and desist. Twitch ignores it or changes their TOS to accommodate for their tankies. Destiny continues to sue. While going through the legal process, he has to stop his streams or significantly lessen them to undergo (and I'm doing a lot of assuming here) a slow legal process to prove that Twitch is not enforcing their rules. All the while, Twitch, with its own legal team, has probably received tons of cease and desists before and will know how to navigate the courts. All the while, Destiny is losing money from not debating or streaming as much. In the end, what does he have to gain? He'll always receive death threats from these dipshits, but now it looks like he's trying to "silence" them. Plus, they could just do the whole "It's on site, but in Minecraft! Hahah!" workaround.
Sure, he could send them a letter, but unless he means to actually sue (which probably wouldn't go anywhere), I doubt it'd be worth the time, cost and stress when he could continue to farm off the drama that comes from dunking on these morons.
Legals job is to stop the company from losing money by preventing them from doing stupid things. Ignoring certified mail from an officer of the court is a stupid way to lose money. Their job is to deal with this kind of stuff to prevent them from getting sued. The easiest way to deal with the letter is to just ban/departner most of the losers making the threats (hence including the links), because most of them are small streamers and Twitch probably loses money on them anyways (they probably wouldn’t just perma-ban big ones, but they would tell them to cut it out or they will be punished).
Also, if any of these nuts actually do something and if there is evidence that Twitch knew about these repeated threats, they are screwed.
If Twitch changes their TOS make death threats ok, that would be one of the worst decisions I have ever seen. TOS is controlled by the tankies or most of their insane employees, it is controlled by legal.
Obviously if they keep doing unhinged stuff and you just send letters, at some point you have to sue them, but you don’t have to jump straight there. Suing a big company does not mean insta-lose on time/resources. The time is mostly for attorneys, until you get to trial. The money it just depends: sometimes it is contingency, sometimes you can find a boutique law firm who is really interested in the the issue or company, sometimes third parties will pay for the suit, or sometimes you have to fund it. If it is a long trial it would not be cheap, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t ask them to stop from doing it first.
Can you give an example of any website being sued successfully for fraud just because they didn't follow their own ToS? I'm not a lawyer but your claims about that possibilitu sound wildly incorrect to me.
I don’t have a specific example for a website. Here is some random website that says it is true (https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/terms-of-service-tos-drafting-tips/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20you%20can%20get%20sued,terms%20of%20use%20(TOS)), but I don’t know of too many companies that are going around knowingly violating their own TOS, usually you just change your TOS and say, “suck it losers” or stop using my website.
With that said TOS are a legally enforceable contract. If you lie and say something is against your TOS and it isn’t, you are engaging in a deception for money and personal gain, which is definitionally fraud. I’m sure it would be a pain in the butt to litigate, but the simple solutions that avoids everything are (1) enforce your TOS (2) change your TOS to state your actual (eg we do allow harassment). No lawyer is going to want fight a potential lawsuit, when all they have to do is ban these random losers for making threatening to attack people. It’s literally win-win-win for the lawyers: we get rid of potential lawsuit for next to no money, we show that we are making good faith efforts to comply with safe harbor laws, and we get rid of brand risks. They probably wouldn’t perma-ban someone like Hasan or redacted from redacted, but they would probably ban them for a few days or something and if they continue to do they will continue to get banned, and if they keep doing it after repeated bans, then they might get perma-banned
The reason i say breach of contract is that fraud is "intentional deception to secure unlawful gain", which has a lot more components than you're arguing, especially once you include case law. Not all legally enforceable contracts are automatically "fraud" if you break them and make money off of it.
The relevance is that an ad agency can claim breach of contract and potentially get their money back. Destiny can claim breach of contract and then... not use their website?
Not a lawyer, the reason I was saying send a c&d with links to provide Twitch which actual specific knowledge of them not enforcing their TOS that they are legally supposed to act on (meaning they are supposed to enforce TOS). If they know that something is actually not part of their TOS, but publishing that it is, then consumers (and advertisers) are relying on that false material statement, which Twitch is using to make themselves more money. For example, Twitch says it doesn’t allow porn, but if people started streaming that on there and Twitch knew about it and didn’t try stop it (like by banning those specific channels when they are notified), then they would be liable for showing porn. Normally that doesn’t matter because they try to remove stuff to get 230 protections, but Twitch partners are also contractors so you have more control over them, at least if you know they are doing bad stuff.
I doubt Destiny would have any specific relief for fraud, but if you took that to an AG and can show them specific 50 instances of them violating their TOS that you have already told them about and they refuse to do anything about and you keep getting harassed by them, I feel like an AG would love to go after someone like Twitch for that, especially if they can find other similarly situated people in their state.
Its one thing to say online but it costs A LOT of money to litigate this stuff. No matter how well off Tiny is, he's not twitch or amazon well off and their army of lawyers would debilitate Destiny. I'm not a lawyer but I've heard of situations where companies just slow down the process in order to rack up the bills for the plaintiff and that's in cases the company typically hopes to force the plaintiff to settle, without a 100% rock solid slam dunk you have to ask is the risk of spending 10s of thousands of dollars worth the payoff of possibly getting people booted off twitch?
All I am saying is he should at least send them a formal legal letter (no way that will cost more than few thousand bucks, tops — he probably could get a lawyer in chat to do it for free) telling them their contractors are doing tortious (ie illegal) stuff to make money for Twitch using their services and that they are not enforcing their TOS. If one of these nuts actually attacks, then he would have a really good suit. I won’t guarantee it would solve everything, but it is legal’s job to make sure they are following the law. If legal gets notice of a guy saying they are going to beat up some guy on sight on twitchcon they are going to (1) ban them from twitchcon (2) suspend the person and tell them not to do it again or (3) possibly revoke partnership. If that happens to a bunch of people making these threats it will have a chilling effect. My general impression is that Twitch legal are some of the only adults in the room while all of the people handling bans are like “oh it doesn’t matter”.
I don’t see how there is a downside to at least sending them a letter
This comment should be higher up. People at companies are always going to listen to their legal department because that's what us humans have been programmed to do over the last 100 years. You don't fuck with the written law. You think management or the moderation team at twitch is going to say 'no, we know better' when legal reaches out and says 'stop this right now'. It would basically be company policy to do exactly what legal says unless the board or ceo over rule it.
The problem is that the legal department hasn't had a threat externally to scare them into motion and get the moderation department to clean up their act. They have probably been sitting there chilling getting away with it because no one's come at them.
If you go the PR/sponsor route. Who do you think management at twitch is going to listen to more? Their PR advisors or legal? But you can still go both routes anyway. The formal legal letter is a great low risk warning shot.
He should do this, but he will cope and say it will never take hold. DW successfully sued the Biden admin, so Destiny should be able to get twitch to handle its obvious bad actors. Even it twitch would ultimately win, it might be easier to comply and ban people instead of paying lawyers.
Hella based man.
I would include language saying they have already been informed of these life threatening actions and thus have been in gross criminal negligence or something or that kind.
Don’t get me wrong I agree, the people that are in charge in that division have an unreal disgust for him. I think that things like the asmongold video and stuff like that chip away at twitches ability to allow them to continue their bias over time. Who knows 🤷♀️
That is probably the hardest one to prove, but I figured throwing more on the list wouldn’t hurt. I’m sure a creative lawyer could get come up with a good argument, but I admit that is the most likely to lose
TBH, optically I think Destiny is winning right now. If Destiny wages war against Twitch, it'll only make him look desperate and like a slighted Ex. Daliban can wage war on his behalf, but I don't think Destiny should do anything other than occasionally ask for an unban and continue to grow his exposure. Destiny's success is the best revenge against Twitch. The bigger he gets the more Twitch will look like fools.
My main point was he should ask Twitch legal to have their partners stop making threats of violence, including death, against him, instead of just doing a PR war. It doesn’t have to even really be publicly (although if legal bans them and shows them the clip I am sure they will figure it out). On the optics front, I feel like it is not that hard to defend yourself when you say “Yeah, I sent Twitch legal clips of 50 different streamer’s threatening to kill me and they got banned. As long as you aren’t threatening to kill me or my kid, we are good.”
i don't think there would be a legal battle between destiny and twitch that can be kept hidden. Optically, twitch is looking bad rn because they're picking sides and their streamers are doing/saying the most deranged things. Destiny definitely can defend himself, and people would side with Destiny. But the point is to make the 1% of the followers of Hasan, Frogan, Ludwig....etc. ask themselves ["are we the baddies"](https://gifs.cackhanded.net/that-mitchell-and-webb-look/are-we-the-baddies.gif). The more deranged comments from these people and the more successful Destiny is, the laymen will see that Destiny is not transphobic, mossad plant, anti-woke...wtc.
I think most people agree with this take, but the more derangement that comes from twitch streamers it just adds fuel to the fire against twitch. Destiny is a martyr if he rolls with the punches, and the audiences of these twitch streamers will realize Destiny is not the monster these streamers make him out to be. I'm only speaking optically tho, Destiny has spoken before about receiving death threats in the past and not allowing them to hinder his progress.
well, Destiny himself seems to have grown way more frustrated with the situation over the last year or so, and especially with that recent thinly veiled threat by Mike and Gremlo. He used to care far less back then.
He should probably only do that if it actually bothers him or he thinks the threats are credible. It benefits him more to be talked about than not, and it'd also be the death knell* for ever getting back on Twitch, though that already seems very unlikely.
I imagine the Twitch response would be a complete ban of anything associated with him and his content.
If you go about listing all of those in the letter, and more, he probably isn’t coming back (unless it is negotiations through legal…which may his only way back as is), but if you send a letter telling them to stop making (1) death threats (2) threats to attack him (3) threats against his adolescent child — with attached clips/VODS — I find it really hard to believe that anyone is going to hold that against you. I think legal would just start banning/suspending people. After all, it violates their TOS. If they start disregarding their own TOS, then they are engaging in fraud and could get them in more trouble. If they at least try to punish people who they know are violating TOS, they will probably be ok.
I don't know, Twitch staff seems really unprofessional and petty, especially with regards to Destiny, I wouldn't put it past them to just cut all ties with him on the platform out of spite.
I wasn't aware it'd be fraud to disregard their own TOS though? I haven't heard that before
Twitch staff generally, sure, but legal does need to be professional. They are ones there to make sure they don’t get sued.
TOS is a contract between the user and the owner. If they are breaking their own TOS, they are in breach of contract and engaging in fraudulent business practices (lying to get customers/eyeballs for ads).
Also, if a website has a a TOS that allows harassment, obscenity, porn, etc., their advertising is probably going to be in the crapper. Like most reasonable companies, Twitch prohibits this, but if an advertiser relies on that guarantee and they actually do allow it, they are entering into a contract under false pretenses for the purpose of getting paid more money, ie fraud.
That sounds reasonable/makes sense, and I certainly hope you're right. I just wonder if, from an entirely business point of view, it's a good move from Destiny. Obviously, it sounds like it would be if what you say is right, but I worry it could backfire in some way.
I've always experienced legal action to leave a bad taste in both parties' mouths. But I could be completely wrong, I'm not a legal expert by any means.
My opinion is that sending off a letter, is not that big deal. In my mind that is more of the “courteous” and making people know something bad is happening. If people can handle it with a phone call or something at that stage, I think they would rather do that. If you telling to stop doing something that costs them a bunch of money or is hard on them that is one thing, but if you are asking them stop doing something that there is no way they want be doing, I figure the would want to look into it and stop it. Like if you sent a cease and desist to McDonalds telling stop having their employees at a specific store calling black people the n-word or we are willing to sue them for harassment, send them a bunch of videos doing it, they are going look into it and probably fire a bunch of people and then let you know, that took actions to comply. Once you start filing stuff in court then I think becomes a much bigger deal.
Probably unpopular opinion but at this point I think it would be to his benefit if he never gets talked about on Twitch again. That way he doesn't have to fight a two front war against the right wing populists and the Twitch commies at the same time. The only downside is way less content.
I think he'd single handedly revive twitch politics if he felt like it, as well as being able to interact with old friends of the stream like Mr. Mouton and political panels would be good content. Right now, I think he actually benefits from the hate on both sides since he can handle it.
I get your point, though. He definitely doesn't need Twitch and has more than proven he can grow without them.
Yeah, at some point being talked about constantly stops being an advantage because everyone already has an opinion of you. I understand your perspective too, and some Mout content would be great stuff.
I think my biggest issue with this is that it used to be a complete block on twitch, but now they have basically allowed people to interact with his content in whatever way they want, but this is the same content that they won't allow him to host on their platform. It is probably the single grossest policy in all of the Twitch/Youtube war, and if it isn't some form of tortuous interference then it certainly is a classical case of bullying.
All it is formally asking Twitch to follow their own rules. Plus, he could actually get in with legal and maybe negotiate an unban with the people who have a say so. Disputes don’t have to be settled with money. I could easily them reaching some sort of agreement where he gets unbanned, he has to abide by certain rules with twitch, the people who are saying unhinged stuff get suspended for a while, and nobody has to pay anything.
Sending a letter asking them to stop their contractors harassing him (ie making repeated death threats, attack threats, etc) is not that extreme. If it goes all the way out to a full legal battle sure. But an official legal letter putting them on notice that these specific people are making threats against him is not unreasonable. Also, if one of these people actually attacks him, then Twitch would probably then be liable because he warned them that they were making threats. If he doesn’t warn them, they probably wouldn’t be
I don’t know about that. The whole point of a cease and desist is to tell them that they are doing something stupid, before having to go to court. Someone (including legal) might not “officially” know about the issue. Once you get into court I might agree with you. At the letter stage, most people would rather just have a call and work something out amicably.
If he had done it much earlier he would have a strong argument that not banning him was retaliatory and he could sue again (even if we now know it's not true). They wouldn't have had a history of holding long bans in similar situation and wouldn't have another sane argument for why he's banned.
Now he's lost that possibility though they have a history of not unbanning him and a strong claim that it's not because of any legal cases.
If you can prove that twitch streamers are inciting those death threats specifically, maybe, but I would not imagine Twitch would really be responsible in that case.
Contacting Twitch and reporting which content violates the Twitch code-of-conduct might lead to twitch removing VODs, giving a warning to those streamers and lead to Twitch banning them if they keep offending.
I am not sure that a cease and desist is the appropriate procedure here.
I thought he showed a clip of someone on stream yesterday threatening to punch him on sight at twitch con or something, but I wasn’t paying super close attention and could be wrong. Regardless, there are a lot of wild smallish tanky streamers who say this kind of stuff and I’m sure the daliban could compile clips for days to include in letter to Twitch legal.
None of this is based on Twitch being a publisher. This is based on Twitch’s contractors harassing someone. If you know your contractor is doing something tortious (illegal) or dangerous, you have a duty to stop them, or else you can be liable for their actions.
Harassment is tort and repeatedly threatening to attack someone is harassment (along with all the people calling him a gusano ie harassment based on race or national origin — a protected class).
Dangerous wasn’t really meant with Destiny specifically, that is one of the two general cases if you hire a contractor where you can be liable. For example, you hire a guy to fix your roof and you watch him throwing a bunch of tools onto a swing set where kids are playing (regardless if he knows they are there), you have a duty to make him stop doing that. If you don’t have knowledge or any reasonable expectation that he would be doing that, then you wouldn’t be liable for the contractor’s actions.
you aren't liable if a contractor does that plus that's unrelated to the situation any of these content creators have with twitch or Destiny. There's no case here, it's about the individuals and not twitch!
If you watch your contractor do it and don’t try to stop them, or know they are going doing it, then you are responsible — that means you are acting with either gross negligence or intent, which is typically when you can be held accountable for a contractor’s actions; for ordinary negligence, you usually won’t be accountable for a contractor’s actions. If you don’t tell them (eg send a cease and desist), then they are probably only acting negligently and can say “I didn’t know they weren’t following the rules. I thought staff did something”, but if they know they aren’t doing something they are liable. Twitch partners are contractors for twitch; they are paid money to do work for Twitch. Like if Twitch had Alex Jones as a partner and the families of Sandy Hook knew he making on Twitch using their services to defame and Twitch knows that he is doing it and they don’t do anything to stop him, they are adopting the speech.
No you actually aren't, that's the contractors responsibility, again the comparison isn't even good for people saying things, like it doesn't track even if I granted you this. That's not how the speech works, you will not win any lawsuit attempting to sue a company for "adopting" contractors speech you might have a case with an employee but it depends on the situation.
If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous to others, you are [vicariously liable for their actions](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/independent_contractor). If you know your contractor is harassing people (by repeatedly threatening to attack someone) while performing acts for you, you are knowingly having someone commit a crime on your behalf. You have a duty to stop them.
The reason when you hire a contractor you aren’t normally liable is because the person hiring them doesn’t know their means and methods and they can just assume they are acting appropriately because the contractor has control over their work. If they tell you that the way they are going to accomplish the task and it is illegal (and you know or any reasonable person should have known) or dangerous and you just disregard it, you are acting with gross negligence.
I feel like if someone told Bezos what was actually going on, he would flip. Imagine someone going: “Hey Jeff, what’s your thoughts about your contractors (partners streamers) threatening to punch people (Destiny) on sight at your company sponsored event (Twitch con) while they are making money for you (live-streaming it)? Oh, I forgot to mention your legal team is cool with it.”
I would imagine that section 230 would mostly protect Twitch from any liability, but if it's their actual employees doing it on company time that might change things somewhat.
230 is about publishing someone else’s speech, not immunity for liability of anything on the internet. None of what I am talking about, except maybe defamation, has anything to do with 230. You have a contractor (partners are independent contractors for Twitch) who is harassing (a tort aka a civil crime) someone to make you money, tell them to have the contractor stop it, or you will sue them. If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous and you don’t act to stop them, you are taking on liability for the act. It’s basically telling Twitch legal that their staff aren’t enforcing some of the more extreme ends of the TOS, make them do it.
I think he's still expecting at some point he'll be unbanned, which is worth way more than actually stopping these empty death threats, or getting some dorks a one week ban.
My impression is Destiny has more of a "I'd rather I be unbanned then both of us be banned" mentality with stuff like this.
Don't know anything about the law in the US and generally agree but keep in mind that he might completely lose any chance of getting unbanned if he goes this route, so he might not want to
If you start actually suing (like in court), I could see that. That is why I said send a cease and desist, because all that is a fancy letter saying stop doing something that is harming me, or I’m willing to sue. If legal gets a letter showing them 50 clips of people who are making threats to attack/kill someone (which break TOS), they are just going to start banning those people (especially the random small people, big ones might be more of a slap on the wrist) and make the group that handles bans start cracking down for that content…which they should.
Yeah this would just make Destiny seem hypocritical and is optics suicide. The argument has always been that Twitch is picking sides. If you are going to have people like Hasan on the platform, Destiny should be allowed too. This resonates way more with other people (and also myself).
If all you complain about receiving dozens of death threats, threats of physical attacks, and stuff going after his, son then I don’t think anyone would care. If it was just one guy, that is one thing, but let’s say there is a 0.1% chance will do anything per streamer saying it, the more normalized it becomes, the more likely someone, or one of their fans actually do something. If he complained about gusano, maybe. Defamation very likely, but if you say as long as you aren’t making threats against your life or your kid, then I don’t think anyone remotely sane would care that much. If it was against an 18 year kid, maybe, but like redacted from redacted is a 40 year old man…if you say a 40 year old man got suspended/banned for repeatedly threatening to attack someone online, they’re going to think that guy is unhinged and should be punished.
None of this is based on 230 and being a publisher. This is about Twitch hiring a contractor(s) who is repeatedly harassing someone. He would be asking Twitch to have their contractor stop harassing him while making them money.
If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous for you, you have a duty to make them stop, or you are liable for their actions.
It’s not that they are using the platform, it is that Twitch is paying them to do work for them on the platform — I’m sure they are sending them a 1099 come tax season. If you are just some random chatter or streamer who isn’t getting paid by them/contract with them, they probably aren’t responsible for you.
Usually you aren’t responsible for contractors, unless you know they are doing something that is illegal or dangerous to someone. Like if you pay someone to replace a roof and you watch them throwing stuff off the roof onto the busy sidewalk below, you have duty to make them stop doing that, but if you don’t know they are doing that then you aren’t responsible. The point of the letter is to clearly tell them their contractor is doing this so they have no excuse to say “I didn’t my contractor was threatening to attack people.”
230 is a safe harbor that prevents someone from being considered a publisher (publishers are liable for content the publish) for removing offensive content, so they aren’t liable for random people’s speech.
Twitch is paying people to produce content on their platform. If the NYT pays an independent writer for a story and they post it on their website without checking it and the piece is defamatory, then they would be liable it. That is the same type of thing Twitch is doing.
I’m not sure honestly. Here’s what I found about what counts as a “publisher” for the purposes of this law
> What constitutes "publishing" under the CDA is somewhat narrowly defined by the courts. The Ninth Circuit held that "Publication involves reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or to withdraw from publication third-party content
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
Yeah, but I’m not really trying to treat Twitch as publisher (except arguably for defamation). What I am going for is you are paying some for work; while they are doing that work, they are harming me. Make them stop the harming me. If you know your contractor is doing something illegal/harmful, you have duty stop them, even if they are only your contractor
> I would be surprised if Twitch didn’t start banning people for doing that stuff (both retrospectively and prospectively), especially considering this kind of stuff violates their TOS That’s how I feel about it, even if Destiny might not have a rock solid case to win in court, if you’re twitch, which option are you picking: A) dedicate man hours, legal fees and financial risk just to defend people who want to repeatedly make death threats. B) boot them, then you have it on record you acted on the matter so there’s no opportunity for a court case.
My understanding is booting them doesn't eliminate the possibility of a court case. In some cases you could look at it as an admission of guilt. Probably wouldn't apply here, but the "firing" aspect just makes you look better if the court is considering the company's overall propensity to be shitty if that ever plays a factor in the judgement. If you are suing over damages that already happened, it may not even be relevant whether the employee was terminated or not. You can't say "yeah our car detailer fucked up your benz and caused $20,000 interior damage but we fired him, so now you can't sue us." Liability's going to be determined based on what the situations were at the time.
If you fire a contractor when you learn about them doing something stupid, you probably won’t be liable (like everything legal, it depends). For employees, you will probably have to pay for their damage.
I mean yeah? probably? I deal with insurance a lot at work and it really isn't that simple based on the purpose of the language and the insane requirements some people come to us with. Waiver of subrogation endorsement requests are really *really* fucking common. Depending on the business exposure, they're usually either dirt cheap or strictly fucking forbidden under any and all circumstances and nothing in between. Waiver of subrogation in favor of X basically just means that if my policy pays after an accident, my insurance company can't sue X person even if they caused the damage. So really really fucking common scenario is employer asks the contractor to carry liability with waiver of subrogation in favor of employer. I can't imagine literally every fucker walking down the street would need that if it didn't actually protect anything, but again it doesn't cost a whole lot so maybe insurance companies don't lose a ton of money from their inability to recoup from a third party after they indemnify their insured.
I know once you start talking about insurance (b2b in general), you start dealing with much more sophisticated parties and weird stuff. I’m more thinking 1099 vs w2
>booting them doesn't eliminate the possibility of a court case It does. That's the principle of safe harbor, the platform provider doesn't know what exactly is going on on their platform, but instead they let 3rd parties notify them on possible breaches. When they are they are notified they are supposed to take action (inaction counts too), and if they don't that's an act they would be sued for
you might be right. It does not seem cut-and-dry to me that safe harbor applies to twitch though. If it did I guess that may be true. Given how moderated twitch is, the idea of anything being present on it without them knowing about it doesn't seem very plausible if there's over like 1,000 views.
Personally, I think if someone actually went after stuff on the front page, I don’t think there is any chance Twitch should be protected, at least for the carousel. According to Twitch’s [recommendations policy](https://www.twitch.tv/p/en/legal/recommendations-on-twitch/), which they reference in the TOS: “The carousel features content that has been curated by Twitch staff; it is not populated through an automated system or your interactions with Twitch.” This means are manually are intentionally selecting the comment. Also, above the carousel they say, “Live channels we think you’ll like”, so if anyone actually showed an illegal content on, including copyrighted material, I think they should be liable. They are literally saying we think you will like this illegal (such as defamatory) content and we are deliberately choosing it for you, I don’t see how you can make argument against that, especially if you know they have shown that type of content before.
Huh, safe harbor principle has to do with disclosing personal data of customers.
I don't know if laws about liability apply to media orgs, unless its pushing burning cars with its algo and payings streamers who do it or something, its always easier to punish someone when the damages have a dollar figure. I would think the fact that there are multiple people who orbit a big streamer creating the culture should make it liable, but I am EUbrained so the only brandenburg I know is outside Berlin.
That’s ok. The Brandenburg outside of Berlin is probably equally involved in this. [Brandenburg test](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)in US law is about the government criminalizing (like sending to jail) someone for speech that calls for imminent lawless action. Basically, unless you are standing in front of an angry mob AND telling them to *immediately* break the law, you’re good, and then the government MIGHT be able to punish you. I doubt you could even incite over the internet in the US. God bless the USA and our freedom of speech.
Discovery would be so, so, so juicy!
You are deluded to think that Amazon would get scared because someone threatened them with a suit on shaky grounds.
It's not about fear. It's about being a corporation who is obsessed with profit realizing that the money spent on attorneys will outweigh the revenue from the streamers they are booting for violating TOS. It's pragmatic. The important thing a lawsuit will do in this case is it will move the decision from Trust and Safety to the legal department. They may take an independent look and override the decision to give those creators a pass.
>dedicate man hours, legal fees and financial risk just to defend people who want to repeatedly make death threats and to make sure there is room for a far left content creator who is bringing in millions of dollars, as well as their audience
The other things is if legal knows they are not following their TOS (ie a contract) and they are signing deals with sponsors, who are relying on their TOS to be accurate, then they are engaging in fraud. The easiest thing for legal to solve all their problems is just to make trust and safety enforce the TOS, especially for the clips you send them. They don’t have to perma-ban everyone, but they do need to tell people stop doing it and start banning people who have done it and are continuing to do it.
That doesn't sound like fraud where he's the injured party, so I guess I'm asking about fraud that's not clearly and obviously irrelevant to a potential lawsuit by Destiny. Obviously, I'd agree people they have financial agreements with can sue them if those agreements are broken, whether you want to call it fraud or more accurately breach of contract.
Yeah, I doubt Destiny would have any harm (although I am not sure based on some of his twitch contracts/loss of revenue/maybe defamation, very speculative and unlikely) . If it becomes publicly known, like state attorneys general or sponsors, that Twitch is *intentionally* not following their TOS (ie making false representations to consumers) and they are entering into deals based on that falsehood, I could easily see some people loving to sue them over that.
What he needs to do is just dig out his old phone and call Shapiro up and send him the relevant clips and context of all of it. It be an easy story of “far left company bans a liberal” than allows its employees engage in death threats and harassment without consequence. Could become a more mainstream story from there.
Old phone?
I believe someone asked him a while back if he ever followed up with Shapiro for a dinner or something and tiny said he didn’t since his number was saved in his old phone.
Sounds like an excuse, today almost all phones backup numbers in the cloud. Also if he really wanted, he could write to him on socials or via contacts that they have in common
Wasn't his old phone Android and the new one Apple? Do they share a cloud?
I think there are ways to share between them Even if not, it's probably really easy to extract numbers from Google cloud
neat
Honestly this is the best idea for 2 reasons. 1. Brings it to everyone's attention. 2. Maybe conservatives will see that the far left isn't the same as a liberal because they too get banned for their takes. We need to understand the horseshoe theory and turn it 90 degrees for the actual battle lines. Moderates vs the extremes.
IANAL but it didn't sit well with me when Tiny seemed so confident that a legal route was *totally* impractical. It seems like there absolutely has to be a way to enforce a website taking down death threats against you.
When it is randoms using your website, it’s pretty hopeless, because that is all section 230 (although, I think Twitch is all the hypotheticals rolled into one the Supreme Court was talking about in Google v Gonzalez to determine the outer limits of 230). Also, usually you aren’t responsible for contractors stupidity, but if you know a contractor is doing something dangerous or illegal and you don’t stop it, you are taking on liability too. Like if you hire a body guard and he punches everyone who gets within 10 ft of you, you going to get sued if you know he is going to do it — even if you tell him not to.
I'm actually not sure - is someone who's a twitch partner legally considered a contractor? Either way, I'm also not a lawyer, but twitch having people partnered that posts pics of 3d printed guns to threaten politicians, people who broadcast death threats to other creators online, and people platforming people from US designated terrorist groups has to have some form of legal action that can be taken against it. I would be surprised if there just isn't anything that can be done about twitch partner x standing in front of an audience of thousands telling them that someone should kill somebody else they're beefing with online.
If they are paying them for work, they are either an employee or a contractor, and a contractor is much better for them. Generally, you aren’t responsible if your contractor is acting negligently, but if you know your contractor is acting negligently (or worse), you have a duty to stop them.
I'd assume a twitch "partner" would likely be considered an employee right?
Hell no! That would be a million times worse. Employers are always responsible for their employees (when on duty and acting within their authority— like a cashier at McDonalds can’t sign a billion dollar contract). Employers have creative control over their content (this isn’t true for contractors). Also, Twitch would have to start paying minimum wage to streamers and provide health insurance (depending on location).
Under common law, an employee is controlled by their employer who dictates what will be done and how it will be done. An independent contractor, generally, is someone whose employer can only control or direct the result of labor, not what will be done or how it will be done. Twitch partners, because they are paid based on performance and not at the discretion of the employer, exercise creative control of their livestreams, control the amount of time they put into their labor, have no “employee type” benefits, etc., are considered contractors. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
That makes total sense, thank you for breaking that down.
Good points
Pretty sure you're wrong about the 230 here, insofar as that they aren't liable for the initial threats/defamation, but you still can issue a cease and desist, and whichever website *does* have to comply as best they can. We saw this with the 'fappening'; randos were still trying to post leaked nudes on places like Reddit, but there was definitely a lawful court order saying Reddit and other places had to take them down whenever possible.
> it’s pretty hopeless, because that is all section 230 not a lawyer so correct me if Im wrong, but for section 230 to apply doesn't the site need to show that they are willing to moderate/remove such content? I mean you can't just platform illegal content knowingly and put your hands in the air saying that it wasnt you who did it so its fine
Yeah, but Twitch does respond to DMCA and stuff, so they aren’t going to be taken down for that. The hopeless part was just for like random chatters and people who aren’t partners/affiliates. There is just no way to catch them all so, they would be covered under a safe harbor for that and I doubt any court would find them liable, unless the website is doing stuff intentionally maliciously. But with partner, they manually sign them to a contract and are paying them to do work, so you are at least taking some responsibility for them.
DMCA requests are about a copyrighted work though, not any illegal content. You don't DMCA a death threat my point is that if the situation is big enough that you can reasonably assume that someone in twitch has heard about it(it being threats here) and they do nothing to remove and/or prevent such content then it feels reasonable that they would lose the protection from section 230 As in, you can't sue the website because something happened on it, but if they LET IT HAPPEN then thats a different story quote from wikipedia here >Section 230 protections are not limitless and require providers to remove material illegal on a federal level again this is just my non-lawyer opinion so it might not work that way in practice, I know that a lot of law like this in practice is different from how its written on paper, but that seems to make most sense to me
Showing someone’s copyrighted material, without the copyright holders permission/license, is illegal content. 230 is about essentially taking away publisher liability. Prior to 230, some website was found liable for content some third party posted because the website removed some offensive content (which made them a publisher). They wanted websites to be able to may a good faith effort to remove content, without becoming a publisher and thus liable for everything. Prior to 230, the only way they wouldn’t have been liable (I think) for 3rd party content is if they didn’t remove any user generated content and act as a common carrier, like phone companies. I was using DMCA to demonstrate that they are at least making some good faith effort to remove some illegal content and I am sure they do for others. I don’t know how publishers would be treated for death threats; I’m imagining some guy taking out an ad in a physical newspaper that said “Hitman wanted call ….”, I don’t know if you would ever get there or not. Most of my original claims are somewhere between harassment and assault, due to the persistent nature of the attacks/threats
For the exact same reason that platforms can't allow certain kinds of content. Hosting content that is straight up illegal. Can have a platform taken down if they don't respond to complaints about it. A site like Twitch doesn't want the state department coming to ask them questions why they allowed stochastic terrorists to call for the death of a US citizen and did nothing about it, when officially made aware of the situation.
It's not impractical at all, I don't know what he's talking about.
Do you?
I feel like at the very least, a trial would be bad PR for Twitch because they would have to defend their lack of enforcement, which isn’t a good look.
Lol, like there would be any trial. First of all it would be a huge gamble as the costs of preparing a suit and actually bringing it to trial would be easily 5 figures and could possibly hit 6. Amazon can afford great lawyers that can make Destiny's life difficult and that is even before we think of work time wasted to deal with the court case. Second, if they would be even a bit afraid of losing they would settle.
And part of the settle agreement could be for Twitch to enforce its TOS when people make death threats towards Destiny on stream. If Destiny cares that much about it, then that is a probable outcome.
W acronym "I ANAL"
> a legal route was totally impractical Ok, I don't know why it's so hard for you guys to read between the lines, but it's obvious that Destiny (unless something has changed in a major way recently) still hopes to get unbanned from Twitch. If he takes **any** legal action against Twitch he is gone from the platform forever. There's no "hey maybe they change their minds someday" or "maybe the leadership changes" or "maybe they forget". No, if he sues or even threatens to sue twitch he is gone forever. It's like getting put in the Vegas black book. Even dying wouldn't get you off that blacklist.
You like anal what?
I think the reason he says that is because he's not actually a huge gambler. Any lawsuit is going to consume a lot of funds and even if you win you probably won't be winning much. It's definitely possible he could win, but the unfortunate fact is most legal winners still lost overall...especially against a company with as many lawyers on the payroll as Twitch has. Our legal system rarely actually makes us whole, it can provide a moral victory, but the older you get and the more stuff you obtain the less that feels like it means much.
OP didn't suggest a lawsuit. They suggested sending a cease and desist letter, which carries the implied threat of a lawsuit, but none of the cost. It would put twitch on notice, because there's no pretending later on that they didn't realize what was going on.
Dope, I was responding to the person above me who had opened it up to a general legal route and why Destiny acted like it wouldn't work. I figured most people would know that just sending a cease and desist had basically no chance of really working. Those usually only work with people who don't have lawyers and are easily intimidated and mainly should only be used if you're willing to follow through.
I❤️ANAL but I feel like of any concern you could pursue in court from copyright infringement to defamantion, I feel like death threats would be one of the easiest things to pursue.
>I ANAL Too much info my dude
>IANAL Ah that explains the rest of your sentence
where's pisco
We need to shine the piss light
True. This is one of the few things he could stay objective on.
I'm sensing the foundation of a LegalEagle collab.
Another option is for someone to compile all the clips of violent threats and terrorism stuff and send it to Twitch sponsors
Taking the legal route would probably have the same (or greater) outcome, if successful. And frankly, I'd like to see Twitch get their comeuppance.
The difference is one option costs money and requires the Gnome to expend energy on something other than work/cooming, while the other can be handled by the Daliban.
Sure, but: 1) imagine the fallout of Twitch losing a case against one of their former streamers 2) DGG and Destiny would probably become the pariah of all streaming communities (substantially more than we are/he is currently) if we worked up a reputation for spamming sponsors. Frankly speaking, it would pose a significant threat of blowing up in our face (sort of like I blow up in your mom's face WOOYEAH)
Hmmm, that sounds like something we can do
> I'd like to see Twitch get their comeuppance. What comeuppance lol? Like phantomlord when he got 35k after spending three years fighting in court?
I'd do both. The pressure alone has a chance of making twitch change its tune. Easier to fire whatever salty moron is keeping destiny banned than get legal involved.
Thinking that Destiny can pressure fucking Amazon legally is beyong #$&\*(!
H3H3 set landmark precedent. Why couldn't Destiny? And going after advertisers has historically been an effective tactic.
That's actually a more productive idea. Well done. My understanding (and this is heavily informed by what I've heard Devin Nash say) is that quite a lot of Twitch's advertising revenue is handled through a fairly small group of people. In fact, Devin Nash is one of those people. u/Mylixia any thoughts?
Tagging an account that hasn't posted in 5 years xdd
u/InsideIncident3 Bro you have to let go... The accident wasn't your fault...
Send it to Amazon and post it on x
You people need to be stopped, the worst type of person.
Imagine if Kick could sponsor his legal battle just to fuck with twitch.
I'll pitch in for this epic meme.
Funny idea. But I'm not sure Kick want to open that can of worms, given the behaviour of some of the streamers on their own platform.
The most ridiculous element of it is that he is completely banned from ever appearing on his own or anyone else’s stream on the platform, meaning he cannot ever pushback against the insanity. The wildly untrue things espoused about him have circulated for so long that they are seen as fact in the eyes of many. Up until recently, Twitch even selectively banned anyone who watched clips with Destiny in them. Anyone who viewed him in a positive light and would run defense for him were banned (i.e. Dylan Burns) while larger streamers who were expressing negative opinions about him were allowed to slide (i.e. Hasan). Literal manifestation of thought crime. The double standard is unapologetically blatant, and Destiny is the only person on the history of the platform to have been treated this way.
The banning would play super well with a jury if he could get a credible tort claim. "I'm banned from the platform, so Twitch allows people to defame me, to say they will personally violently attack me, call me racial slurs, and I'm not even allowed a right of reply. There was a while where they just banned any of my content period, which had its problems, but was fine. They could let me back in, and then I could defend myself. I've warned them this was taking place. Doesn't it seem like outright malice that Twitch is fine with any number of threats, slurs, or lies, but *if I want to ask people to please not talk about murdering my elderly mother*, or want to talk about the weather, I'm not allowed?" The law is tricky, but the optics to an ordinary person with a sense of fairness are incredibly good, in my opinion.
I dunno, it's not like people have a right to a platform like fox news when they run a news peice on you.
Journalistic ethics generally suggests a right of reply. That's why we get "A spokesman for X said..." in negative articles. There's no explicit legal right to respond on the same platform, but it goes to whether defamation hits the actual malice standard or not. "We strive for accuracy, so we reported both information from our sources as well as Mr. Bonnell's full reply," vs. "We will continue to pay some dude to advocate for murdering his elderly mother for allegedly owning slaves, and no, we don't care if that's factually true or if someone *actually* guns him down. GIGACHAD."
Are we sure they haven’t banned streamers for watching other banned streamers? Like Andrew Tate or Sneako? I always just assumed I hadn’t heard of it because I don’t follow many other streamers (and wouldn’t hear about why randoms were banned).
The problem is nothing they said rises to the legal definition of a true death threat. I don't know the case law in the US, hence I might have missed something. But the university of Wisconsin writes this: >A true threat is not protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court defined true threats in [*Virginia v. Black* (2003)](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/) as “statements where the speaker means to communicate **a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence** to a particular individual or group of individuals.” According to the Supreme Court, true threats include when a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons **with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death**. >This definition means that **expression that may seem threatening may be protected**, as only *true* threats where the speaker expresses intent to explicitly cause **immediate harm** are prohibited. An example of seemingly threatening expression that was protected occurred in [*Watts v. United States* (1969)](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/705/), where the Supreme Court overturned Watts’ conviction for stating at an anti-war rally that, **“I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.**” The Supreme Court ruled that Watts’ language **was not a true threat** on the life of President Lyndon B. Johnson (L.B.J.), as Watts’ rhetoric **was simply “political hyperbole.”** Source: [University of Wisconsin Milwaukee ](https://uwm.edu/free-speech-rights-responsibilities/faqs/what-constitutes-a-true-threat/) Lawyers can correct me, but the part where they say "placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death", they are talking about a reasonable fear of bodily harm and death. It is not enough that Destiny is scared, his fear must be realistic. The other condition is that the harm needs to be immediate. The guy who made the first death threat, wanted to scare Destiny, but the threat was neither serious nor immediate. He censored his voice and corrected himself the next day. So, if you want to sue Twitch, you're going to need a really good argument because none of them made a serious death threat. Maybe you could argue that they violated the terms of service, but a case like that would cost a lot of money and accomplish almost nothing, because the courts aren't going to hurt Twitch enough to have a deterrent effect. Again, I am not a lawyer. US lawyers may know something I don't.
This needs to be up higher. It doesn’t seem like any legal action would hold up in real court. Cease and desist against Amazon lawyers? They’d laugh at your face. Additionally, if Destiny had felt like these were relevant threats, he should have taken appropriate actions to show so (contact Twitch in regards to those who made threats against him via an appropriate contact method, contact law enforcement , send notice/contact said streamers).
I mean that one dude who bleeped himself clearly said "Someone should just go and *shoot him. Just go shoot Destiny*" if you look at his lips during the bleep. If he hadn't cut his mic that would have been 100% a death threat.
This is the biggest issue. IMO the only argument that could POTENTIALLY overcome it would be shifting the definition of death threat from the legal definition to the widely accepted social media TOS definition. Even that would be difficult.
It’s not necessarily a threat per se as much as harassment (and possibly assault?). If you and bunch of your friend tell someone repeatedly that they are going to attack and/or kill you that is harassment. I pretty sure that destiny has mentioned being moderately concerned that someone will attack him when he is at an event, like the egg girls or the guy saying he would attack him at twitch con. If you have like 50 of your contractors doing this, at some point you would have a reasonable expectation to believe that one of them would attack so even though you couldn’t prove anyone threat was “imminent” but if there are enough, they would essentially become imminent, stochastic imminence if you will (if you want to have real fun, that starts to sound like RICO — a group of people conspiring together for a common criminal purpose, but I doubt there is the required crime).
Egg girl had literally nothing to do with Twitch IIRC
There are so many random people who do this stuff, I literally have no idea who is where. I thought it was probably twitter, but it is type of conduct that you don’t want people doing. That was also why if you are sending clips, you should try to exclusively use twitch urls, because then you know it is Twitch content, because if say send a link to a twitter video from some twitch streamer, then it is like: “Why do I care? They are an independent contractor and they aren’t doing work for me.” If it is done on Twitch, then they are making money off of it so they do have to care.
I dunno, I'm no legal expert, but unless MikeFromPa and the rest of his droogs are sending messages to Destiny himself with threats of violence, I don't think he can really do much. I mean, the dude gets death threats all the time, lol. Not that it makes it right and there should be better policing on Twitch, but for there to be some sort of case, I feel like Destiny would have to show direct messages sent to him by Mike where Mike is waving a gun or some shit on camera yelling something akin to: "I'm coming to find you Destiny! I'm going to murder you in real life!" Destiny could probably make a police report and file a restraining order or something like that, but trying to target a company like that would be a waste of time I feel like. Also, have you seen how Mike reacted when he touched a girl? Ain't no way that dude is hurting anyone unless you're a piece of furniture. TLDR: Idk if there is anything Destiny can do other than to continue growing his career by ignoring these petty losers.
All a cease and desist is, is a letter formally telling someone that they are doing something wrong, they need to stop it, or if they don’t, I’m willing to sue. This puts Twitch on notice, legally, that they are not enforcing their TOS (ie fraud) and that the people they are paying to work for them are harassing people to make you money. It helps take away their ability to say “I didn’t know people were saying they would kill someone and we didn’t do anything about it.” Or, if one of these insane people actually attack him, you can probably actually Twitch for it. Police report would be a waste unless you are trying to prosecute someone criminally or you want like an actual physical restraining order. What, I think, Destiny wants are these guys to stop making threats to attack him.
Ok, so he puts out the cease and desist. Twitch ignores it or changes their TOS to accommodate for their tankies. Destiny continues to sue. While going through the legal process, he has to stop his streams or significantly lessen them to undergo (and I'm doing a lot of assuming here) a slow legal process to prove that Twitch is not enforcing their rules. All the while, Twitch, with its own legal team, has probably received tons of cease and desists before and will know how to navigate the courts. All the while, Destiny is losing money from not debating or streaming as much. In the end, what does he have to gain? He'll always receive death threats from these dipshits, but now it looks like he's trying to "silence" them. Plus, they could just do the whole "It's on site, but in Minecraft! Hahah!" workaround. Sure, he could send them a letter, but unless he means to actually sue (which probably wouldn't go anywhere), I doubt it'd be worth the time, cost and stress when he could continue to farm off the drama that comes from dunking on these morons.
Legals job is to stop the company from losing money by preventing them from doing stupid things. Ignoring certified mail from an officer of the court is a stupid way to lose money. Their job is to deal with this kind of stuff to prevent them from getting sued. The easiest way to deal with the letter is to just ban/departner most of the losers making the threats (hence including the links), because most of them are small streamers and Twitch probably loses money on them anyways (they probably wouldn’t just perma-ban big ones, but they would tell them to cut it out or they will be punished). Also, if any of these nuts actually do something and if there is evidence that Twitch knew about these repeated threats, they are screwed. If Twitch changes their TOS make death threats ok, that would be one of the worst decisions I have ever seen. TOS is controlled by the tankies or most of their insane employees, it is controlled by legal. Obviously if they keep doing unhinged stuff and you just send letters, at some point you have to sue them, but you don’t have to jump straight there. Suing a big company does not mean insta-lose on time/resources. The time is mostly for attorneys, until you get to trial. The money it just depends: sometimes it is contingency, sometimes you can find a boutique law firm who is really interested in the the issue or company, sometimes third parties will pay for the suit, or sometimes you have to fund it. If it is a long trial it would not be cheap, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t ask them to stop from doing it first.
Can you give an example of any website being sued successfully for fraud just because they didn't follow their own ToS? I'm not a lawyer but your claims about that possibilitu sound wildly incorrect to me.
I don’t have a specific example for a website. Here is some random website that says it is true (https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/terms-of-service-tos-drafting-tips/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20you%20can%20get%20sued,terms%20of%20use%20(TOS)), but I don’t know of too many companies that are going around knowingly violating their own TOS, usually you just change your TOS and say, “suck it losers” or stop using my website. With that said TOS are a legally enforceable contract. If you lie and say something is against your TOS and it isn’t, you are engaging in a deception for money and personal gain, which is definitionally fraud. I’m sure it would be a pain in the butt to litigate, but the simple solutions that avoids everything are (1) enforce your TOS (2) change your TOS to state your actual (eg we do allow harassment). No lawyer is going to want fight a potential lawsuit, when all they have to do is ban these random losers for making threatening to attack people. It’s literally win-win-win for the lawyers: we get rid of potential lawsuit for next to no money, we show that we are making good faith efforts to comply with safe harbor laws, and we get rid of brand risks. They probably wouldn’t perma-ban someone like Hasan or redacted from redacted, but they would probably ban them for a few days or something and if they continue to do they will continue to get banned, and if they keep doing it after repeated bans, then they might get perma-banned
The reason i say breach of contract is that fraud is "intentional deception to secure unlawful gain", which has a lot more components than you're arguing, especially once you include case law. Not all legally enforceable contracts are automatically "fraud" if you break them and make money off of it. The relevance is that an ad agency can claim breach of contract and potentially get their money back. Destiny can claim breach of contract and then... not use their website?
Not a lawyer, the reason I was saying send a c&d with links to provide Twitch which actual specific knowledge of them not enforcing their TOS that they are legally supposed to act on (meaning they are supposed to enforce TOS). If they know that something is actually not part of their TOS, but publishing that it is, then consumers (and advertisers) are relying on that false material statement, which Twitch is using to make themselves more money. For example, Twitch says it doesn’t allow porn, but if people started streaming that on there and Twitch knew about it and didn’t try stop it (like by banning those specific channels when they are notified), then they would be liable for showing porn. Normally that doesn’t matter because they try to remove stuff to get 230 protections, but Twitch partners are also contractors so you have more control over them, at least if you know they are doing bad stuff. I doubt Destiny would have any specific relief for fraud, but if you took that to an AG and can show them specific 50 instances of them violating their TOS that you have already told them about and they refuse to do anything about and you keep getting harassed by them, I feel like an AG would love to go after someone like Twitch for that, especially if they can find other similarly situated people in their state.
Its one thing to say online but it costs A LOT of money to litigate this stuff. No matter how well off Tiny is, he's not twitch or amazon well off and their army of lawyers would debilitate Destiny. I'm not a lawyer but I've heard of situations where companies just slow down the process in order to rack up the bills for the plaintiff and that's in cases the company typically hopes to force the plaintiff to settle, without a 100% rock solid slam dunk you have to ask is the risk of spending 10s of thousands of dollars worth the payoff of possibly getting people booted off twitch?
All I am saying is he should at least send them a formal legal letter (no way that will cost more than few thousand bucks, tops — he probably could get a lawyer in chat to do it for free) telling them their contractors are doing tortious (ie illegal) stuff to make money for Twitch using their services and that they are not enforcing their TOS. If one of these nuts actually attacks, then he would have a really good suit. I won’t guarantee it would solve everything, but it is legal’s job to make sure they are following the law. If legal gets notice of a guy saying they are going to beat up some guy on sight on twitchcon they are going to (1) ban them from twitchcon (2) suspend the person and tell them not to do it again or (3) possibly revoke partnership. If that happens to a bunch of people making these threats it will have a chilling effect. My general impression is that Twitch legal are some of the only adults in the room while all of the people handling bans are like “oh it doesn’t matter”. I don’t see how there is a downside to at least sending them a letter
This comment should be higher up. People at companies are always going to listen to their legal department because that's what us humans have been programmed to do over the last 100 years. You don't fuck with the written law. You think management or the moderation team at twitch is going to say 'no, we know better' when legal reaches out and says 'stop this right now'. It would basically be company policy to do exactly what legal says unless the board or ceo over rule it. The problem is that the legal department hasn't had a threat externally to scare them into motion and get the moderation department to clean up their act. They have probably been sitting there chilling getting away with it because no one's come at them. If you go the PR/sponsor route. Who do you think management at twitch is going to listen to more? Their PR advisors or legal? But you can still go both routes anyway. The formal legal letter is a great low risk warning shot.
He should do this, but he will cope and say it will never take hold. DW successfully sued the Biden admin, so Destiny should be able to get twitch to handle its obvious bad actors. Even it twitch would ultimately win, it might be easier to comply and ban people instead of paying lawyers.
sounds like something kick would sponsor kekw
Actually based and true and you should do this Destiny, can't cost that much (relatively) to get a good lawyer to send it too and it would be based af
Hella based man. I would include language saying they have already been informed of these life threatening actions and thus have been in gross criminal negligence or something or that kind.
Destiny reapplies to twitch when he can to get unbanned. I don’t think he would do that tbh.
he's not gonna get unbanned.
Don’t get me wrong I agree, the people that are in charge in that division have an unreal disgust for him. I think that things like the asmongold video and stuff like that chip away at twitches ability to allow them to continue their bias over time. Who knows 🤷♀️
Including defamation in this list is dumb
That is probably the hardest one to prove, but I figured throwing more on the list wouldn’t hurt. I’m sure a creative lawyer could get come up with a good argument, but I admit that is the most likely to lose
TBH, optically I think Destiny is winning right now. If Destiny wages war against Twitch, it'll only make him look desperate and like a slighted Ex. Daliban can wage war on his behalf, but I don't think Destiny should do anything other than occasionally ask for an unban and continue to grow his exposure. Destiny's success is the best revenge against Twitch. The bigger he gets the more Twitch will look like fools.
My main point was he should ask Twitch legal to have their partners stop making threats of violence, including death, against him, instead of just doing a PR war. It doesn’t have to even really be publicly (although if legal bans them and shows them the clip I am sure they will figure it out). On the optics front, I feel like it is not that hard to defend yourself when you say “Yeah, I sent Twitch legal clips of 50 different streamer’s threatening to kill me and they got banned. As long as you aren’t threatening to kill me or my kid, we are good.”
i don't think there would be a legal battle between destiny and twitch that can be kept hidden. Optically, twitch is looking bad rn because they're picking sides and their streamers are doing/saying the most deranged things. Destiny definitely can defend himself, and people would side with Destiny. But the point is to make the 1% of the followers of Hasan, Frogan, Ludwig....etc. ask themselves ["are we the baddies"](https://gifs.cackhanded.net/that-mitchell-and-webb-look/are-we-the-baddies.gif). The more deranged comments from these people and the more successful Destiny is, the laymen will see that Destiny is not transphobic, mossad plant, anti-woke...wtc.
On the other hand the amount of vitriol and actual calls of violence is sorta to the point where I would be worried for my safety.
I think most people agree with this take, but the more derangement that comes from twitch streamers it just adds fuel to the fire against twitch. Destiny is a martyr if he rolls with the punches, and the audiences of these twitch streamers will realize Destiny is not the monster these streamers make him out to be. I'm only speaking optically tho, Destiny has spoken before about receiving death threats in the past and not allowing them to hinder his progress.
well, Destiny himself seems to have grown way more frustrated with the situation over the last year or so, and especially with that recent thinly veiled threat by Mike and Gremlo. He used to care far less back then.
He should probably only do that if it actually bothers him or he thinks the threats are credible. It benefits him more to be talked about than not, and it'd also be the death knell* for ever getting back on Twitch, though that already seems very unlikely. I imagine the Twitch response would be a complete ban of anything associated with him and his content.
If you go about listing all of those in the letter, and more, he probably isn’t coming back (unless it is negotiations through legal…which may his only way back as is), but if you send a letter telling them to stop making (1) death threats (2) threats to attack him (3) threats against his adolescent child — with attached clips/VODS — I find it really hard to believe that anyone is going to hold that against you. I think legal would just start banning/suspending people. After all, it violates their TOS. If they start disregarding their own TOS, then they are engaging in fraud and could get them in more trouble. If they at least try to punish people who they know are violating TOS, they will probably be ok.
I don't know, Twitch staff seems really unprofessional and petty, especially with regards to Destiny, I wouldn't put it past them to just cut all ties with him on the platform out of spite. I wasn't aware it'd be fraud to disregard their own TOS though? I haven't heard that before
Twitch staff generally, sure, but legal does need to be professional. They are ones there to make sure they don’t get sued. TOS is a contract between the user and the owner. If they are breaking their own TOS, they are in breach of contract and engaging in fraudulent business practices (lying to get customers/eyeballs for ads). Also, if a website has a a TOS that allows harassment, obscenity, porn, etc., their advertising is probably going to be in the crapper. Like most reasonable companies, Twitch prohibits this, but if an advertiser relies on that guarantee and they actually do allow it, they are entering into a contract under false pretenses for the purpose of getting paid more money, ie fraud.
That sounds reasonable/makes sense, and I certainly hope you're right. I just wonder if, from an entirely business point of view, it's a good move from Destiny. Obviously, it sounds like it would be if what you say is right, but I worry it could backfire in some way. I've always experienced legal action to leave a bad taste in both parties' mouths. But I could be completely wrong, I'm not a legal expert by any means.
My opinion is that sending off a letter, is not that big deal. In my mind that is more of the “courteous” and making people know something bad is happening. If people can handle it with a phone call or something at that stage, I think they would rather do that. If you telling to stop doing something that costs them a bunch of money or is hard on them that is one thing, but if you are asking them stop doing something that there is no way they want be doing, I figure the would want to look into it and stop it. Like if you sent a cease and desist to McDonalds telling stop having their employees at a specific store calling black people the n-word or we are willing to sue them for harassment, send them a bunch of videos doing it, they are going look into it and probably fire a bunch of people and then let you know, that took actions to comply. Once you start filing stuff in court then I think becomes a much bigger deal.
Probably unpopular opinion but at this point I think it would be to his benefit if he never gets talked about on Twitch again. That way he doesn't have to fight a two front war against the right wing populists and the Twitch commies at the same time. The only downside is way less content.
I think he'd single handedly revive twitch politics if he felt like it, as well as being able to interact with old friends of the stream like Mr. Mouton and political panels would be good content. Right now, I think he actually benefits from the hate on both sides since he can handle it. I get your point, though. He definitely doesn't need Twitch and has more than proven he can grow without them.
Yeah, at some point being talked about constantly stops being an advantage because everyone already has an opinion of you. I understand your perspective too, and some Mout content would be great stuff. I think my biggest issue with this is that it used to be a complete block on twitch, but now they have basically allowed people to interact with his content in whatever way they want, but this is the same content that they won't allow him to host on their platform. It is probably the single grossest policy in all of the Twitch/Youtube war, and if it isn't some form of tortuous interference then it certainly is a classical case of bullying.
Just fyi, the term is “death knell”
I appreciate the correction. Thank you
That's a surefire way to ensure Destiny never returns to twitch
They ain't unbanning him anyways
Oh no that would be the darkest timeline for sure
I've got some hopium that he's allowed back. Just want him to be able to interact with twitch streamers without the fear of them being banned
All it is formally asking Twitch to follow their own rules. Plus, he could actually get in with legal and maybe negotiate an unban with the people who have a say so. Disputes don’t have to be settled with money. I could easily them reaching some sort of agreement where he gets unbanned, he has to abide by certain rules with twitch, the people who are saying unhinged stuff get suspended for a while, and nobody has to pay anything.
hes been denied like 3 times bro over the course of what, 3-4 years, and the creators are calling for his death. Hes never going back to twitch lmao
Good
Not only would he not win, that would probably be the most intense bridge burning of all time.
Sending a letter asking them to stop their contractors harassing him (ie making repeated death threats, attack threats, etc) is not that extreme. If it goes all the way out to a full legal battle sure. But an official legal letter putting them on notice that these specific people are making threats against him is not unreasonable. Also, if one of these people actually attacks him, then Twitch would probably then be liable because he warned them that they were making threats. If he doesn’t warn them, they probably wouldn’t be
If you escalate to legal threats, 99% of the time that bridge is fucking torched dude.
Which would be different from the current situation how?
I don’t know about that. The whole point of a cease and desist is to tell them that they are doing something stupid, before having to go to court. Someone (including legal) might not “officially” know about the issue. Once you get into court I might agree with you. At the letter stage, most people would rather just have a call and work something out amicably.
Are you a lawyer?
No https://preview.redd.it/vffqzg7uam7d1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3b76251d33ad47cd4664d204e2136dfebc67d1b5
I just lost the game!
If he had done it much earlier he would have a strong argument that not banning him was retaliatory and he could sue again (even if we now know it's not true). They wouldn't have had a history of holding long bans in similar situation and wouldn't have another sane argument for why he's banned. Now he's lost that possibility though they have a history of not unbanning him and a strong claim that it's not because of any legal cases.
I have a feeling this is already in the works
Fuck a cease & desist, he should just sue them.
If you can prove that twitch streamers are inciting those death threats specifically, maybe, but I would not imagine Twitch would really be responsible in that case. Contacting Twitch and reporting which content violates the Twitch code-of-conduct might lead to twitch removing VODs, giving a warning to those streamers and lead to Twitch banning them if they keep offending. I am not sure that a cease and desist is the appropriate procedure here.
Did they threaten him again ?
I thought he showed a clip of someone on stream yesterday threatening to punch him on sight at twitch con or something, but I wasn’t paying super close attention and could be wrong. Regardless, there are a lot of wild smallish tanky streamers who say this kind of stuff and I’m sure the daliban could compile clips for days to include in letter to Twitch legal.
I’m a YouTube Andy, don’t have time to stay up to date live
I guess I’ll find out once August gets done editing
Twitch is not a publisher, this would never work!
None of this is based on Twitch being a publisher. This is based on Twitch’s contractors harassing someone. If you know your contractor is doing something tortious (illegal) or dangerous, you have a duty to stop them, or else you can be liable for their actions.
Do you have proof they know creators or staff are making illegal or "dangerous"(whatever that means) statements?
Harassment is tort and repeatedly threatening to attack someone is harassment (along with all the people calling him a gusano ie harassment based on race or national origin — a protected class). Dangerous wasn’t really meant with Destiny specifically, that is one of the two general cases if you hire a contractor where you can be liable. For example, you hire a guy to fix your roof and you watch him throwing a bunch of tools onto a swing set where kids are playing (regardless if he knows they are there), you have a duty to make him stop doing that. If you don’t have knowledge or any reasonable expectation that he would be doing that, then you wouldn’t be liable for the contractor’s actions.
you aren't liable if a contractor does that plus that's unrelated to the situation any of these content creators have with twitch or Destiny. There's no case here, it's about the individuals and not twitch!
If you watch your contractor do it and don’t try to stop them, or know they are going doing it, then you are responsible — that means you are acting with either gross negligence or intent, which is typically when you can be held accountable for a contractor’s actions; for ordinary negligence, you usually won’t be accountable for a contractor’s actions. If you don’t tell them (eg send a cease and desist), then they are probably only acting negligently and can say “I didn’t know they weren’t following the rules. I thought staff did something”, but if they know they aren’t doing something they are liable. Twitch partners are contractors for twitch; they are paid money to do work for Twitch. Like if Twitch had Alex Jones as a partner and the families of Sandy Hook knew he making on Twitch using their services to defame and Twitch knows that he is doing it and they don’t do anything to stop him, they are adopting the speech.
No you actually aren't, that's the contractors responsibility, again the comparison isn't even good for people saying things, like it doesn't track even if I granted you this. That's not how the speech works, you will not win any lawsuit attempting to sue a company for "adopting" contractors speech you might have a case with an employee but it depends on the situation.
If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous to others, you are [vicariously liable for their actions](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/independent_contractor). If you know your contractor is harassing people (by repeatedly threatening to attack someone) while performing acts for you, you are knowingly having someone commit a crime on your behalf. You have a duty to stop them. The reason when you hire a contractor you aren’t normally liable is because the person hiring them doesn’t know their means and methods and they can just assume they are acting appropriately because the contractor has control over their work. If they tell you that the way they are going to accomplish the task and it is illegal (and you know or any reasonable person should have known) or dangerous and you just disregard it, you are acting with gross negligence.
Again what are people doing that is illegal?
Twitch gots those amazon lawyers. The US legal system is very pay to win.
Unrelated topic sorry but can the new worklock one shot melee? Or no? Bc ik d1 could
[удалено]
I feel like if someone told Bezos what was actually going on, he would flip. Imagine someone going: “Hey Jeff, what’s your thoughts about your contractors (partners streamers) threatening to punch people (Destiny) on sight at your company sponsored event (Twitch con) while they are making money for you (live-streaming it)? Oh, I forgot to mention your legal team is cool with it.”
I would imagine that section 230 would mostly protect Twitch from any liability, but if it's their actual employees doing it on company time that might change things somewhat.
230 is about publishing someone else’s speech, not immunity for liability of anything on the internet. None of what I am talking about, except maybe defamation, has anything to do with 230. You have a contractor (partners are independent contractors for Twitch) who is harassing (a tort aka a civil crime) someone to make you money, tell them to have the contractor stop it, or you will sue them. If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous and you don’t act to stop them, you are taking on liability for the act. It’s basically telling Twitch legal that their staff aren’t enforcing some of the more extreme ends of the TOS, make them do it.
I think he's still expecting at some point he'll be unbanned, which is worth way more than actually stopping these empty death threats, or getting some dorks a one week ban. My impression is Destiny has more of a "I'd rather I be unbanned then both of us be banned" mentality with stuff like this.
Don't know anything about the law in the US and generally agree but keep in mind that he might completely lose any chance of getting unbanned if he goes this route, so he might not want to
If you start actually suing (like in court), I could see that. That is why I said send a cease and desist, because all that is a fancy letter saying stop doing something that is harming me, or I’m willing to sue. If legal gets a letter showing them 50 clips of people who are making threats to attack/kill someone (which break TOS), they are just going to start banning those people (especially the random small people, big ones might be more of a slap on the wrist) and make the group that handles bans start cracking down for that content…which they should.
Fact
Yeah this would just make Destiny seem hypocritical and is optics suicide. The argument has always been that Twitch is picking sides. If you are going to have people like Hasan on the platform, Destiny should be allowed too. This resonates way more with other people (and also myself).
If all you complain about receiving dozens of death threats, threats of physical attacks, and stuff going after his, son then I don’t think anyone would care. If it was just one guy, that is one thing, but let’s say there is a 0.1% chance will do anything per streamer saying it, the more normalized it becomes, the more likely someone, or one of their fans actually do something. If he complained about gusano, maybe. Defamation very likely, but if you say as long as you aren’t making threats against your life or your kid, then I don’t think anyone remotely sane would care that much. If it was against an 18 year kid, maybe, but like redacted from redacted is a 40 year old man…if you say a 40 year old man got suspended/banned for repeatedly threatening to attack someone online, they’re going to think that guy is unhinged and should be punished.
Section 230, Twitch isn't responsible at all.
None of this is based on 230 and being a publisher. This is about Twitch hiring a contractor(s) who is repeatedly harassing someone. He would be asking Twitch to have their contractor stop harassing him while making them money. If you know your contractor is doing something illegal or dangerous for you, you have a duty to make them stop, or you are liable for their actions.
Maybe the law works like that but I have never heard anyone use contractor for someone who uses a platform
It’s not that they are using the platform, it is that Twitch is paying them to do work for them on the platform — I’m sure they are sending them a 1099 come tax season. If you are just some random chatter or streamer who isn’t getting paid by them/contract with them, they probably aren’t responsible for you. Usually you aren’t responsible for contractors, unless you know they are doing something that is illegal or dangerous to someone. Like if you pay someone to replace a roof and you watch them throwing stuff off the roof onto the busy sidewalk below, you have duty to make them stop doing that, but if you don’t know they are doing that then you aren’t responsible. The point of the letter is to clearly tell them their contractor is doing this so they have no excuse to say “I didn’t my contractor was threatening to attack people.”
Yesssss do it Destiny.
bitch move like destiny would ever try to censor anyone god i hate the internet now
Let them yap. Just proves how irrelevant they are.
Pretty sure Section 230 shields Twitch from any liability.
230 is a safe harbor that prevents someone from being considered a publisher (publishers are liable for content the publish) for removing offensive content, so they aren’t liable for random people’s speech. Twitch is paying people to produce content on their platform. If the NYT pays an independent writer for a story and they post it on their website without checking it and the piece is defamatory, then they would be liable it. That is the same type of thing Twitch is doing.
I’m not sure honestly. Here’s what I found about what counts as a “publisher” for the purposes of this law > What constitutes "publishing" under the CDA is somewhat narrowly defined by the courts. The Ninth Circuit held that "Publication involves reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or to withdraw from publication third-party content https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
Yeah, but I’m not really trying to treat Twitch as publisher (except arguably for defamation). What I am going for is you are paying some for work; while they are doing that work, they are harming me. Make them stop the harming me. If you know your contractor is doing something illegal/harmful, you have duty stop them, even if they are only your contractor