twitch secretly blocked account creation from israel & palestine for a whole year    cle-825477 it was discovered recently that ips from israel & palestine had been blocked from creating twitch accounts ever since shortly after the october 7th attacks. twitch never stated that there was such a block. throughout the year, israeli users were given error messages and when they filed reports they just got notices back that they weren't eligible for accounts with no further explanation. there are records of online discussions where israelis asked what the issue was and nobody had any idea. after getting bombarded with questions, twitch support put out an initial statement (  /1848191418377830708?t=mfpxpspz1qr0 oz9wry1swg) where they ludicrously claimed that the ban was meant to be temporary and that they forgot to unban the whole country for a whole fucking year. they also claimed that israelis/palestinans were able to create accounts using phone numbers instead of email, but there is evidence that was not the case. nothing about this situation makes any sense at all. for context, neither ukraine or russia have been blocked from account creation since that war started, and there don't appear to be blocks in other warzones either. a major social media company just banned account creation from a whole country for an entire year and are now claiming that they had no idea the block was in place. either this is extreme incompetence or or its malice out of an hatred for israel. i believe its more likely the later, considering that the ceo is a huge hasan piker fan and the platform has been very lenient when it comes to insane remarks from its pro-palestine creators. that motivation is quite ironic as palestine was also blocked, but it still makes more since than them somehow not knowing a whole country was blocked for a whole fucking year. this is one of the worst things i have ever seen a social media company do, and the ceo needs to be fired over this crap.
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