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Famous Twitch steamer Hasan Piker, known by his screenname HasanAbi, has claimed that the platform has temporally banned him for using the word “cracker.”
Piker has over 1.6 million followers on his account and regularly live-streams his show where he talks about the news from a leftist point of view. Piker posted a video on his YouTube channel where he complained about the ban and accused Twitch of being cowardly for not commenting on why his channel was banned.
“They don’t want to come out and say, ‘Anti-white racism is unacceptable on this platform, and that’s why we are banning the usage of the term cracker,’” Piker said, “because they know they would get … clowned on by like 99 percent of media that isn’t predominantly focused on random weirdos that spend all their time in their mother’s basement talking about the ethics of being able to use the C-word versus how they should also be able to say the N-word as well.”
Piker received a one-week ban from the platform, forcing him to reschedule several collaboration streams with other famous Twitch streamers he had planned. He originally said the word in reference to white people during one of his streams.
The term “cracker” stems from an insult from the 18th century targeted towards poor people. The term was shorthand for “whip-cracker” since they would often work with livestock, which involved a whip.
In the United States, the term was originally used by Northerners in reference to slave owners. In the 1900s the term started to be used in reference to bigoted white people.
This situation comes shortly after Twitch promised that it would do a better job at protecting minority creators after several hate raids took place against POC and LGBT+ streamers on the site.
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