There is an ongoing scandal with the U.S. Army on Twitch. More precisely Twitch has blocked the U.S. Army from running controller giveaways. The reason for that is because the U.S. Army redirects users trying to win a controller into the recruitment page of the U.S. Military.
A report from The Nation has done some research on how the military is trying to recruit young teens. During live streams of the Army’s channel viewers were being presented with chat prompts to “win an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller.” But when you click on the link you are greeted with: “a recruiting form with no additional mention of a contest, odds, total number of winners, or when a drawing will occur” as stated by The Nation. The Nation wanted to dig even deeper and reached out for a comment but the U.S. Army declined to answer.
A Twitch spokesperson stated to Kotaku, announcing that the promotion had been removed. “Per our Terms of Service, promotions on Twitch must comply with all applicable laws. This promotion did not comply with our Terms, and we have required them to remove it,” the statement reads.
Last week, the same account of the military was criticized for banning their users that were asking about war crimes in the chat. The U.S. Army later in response while defending its approach stated: “the user’s question was an attempt to shift the conversation to imply that Soldiers commit war crimes based on an optional weapon in a game, and we felt that violated Twitch’s harassment policy.”
