Earlier this week, prominent streamer Ludvig ‘Anomaly’ Lagerstedt received a 30-day suspension from Twitch after he briefly showed a Minecraft skin depicting Adolph Hitler. Anomaly is appealing the ban – he says it’s “quite excessive” – but the streamer has already gotten into hot water with Twitch over hateful conduct in the past.
In the offending clip, Anomaly opens his Minecraft inventory and immediately closes it as he realises the Hitler skin is on display. “Oh my god, I have the wrong skin on me,” he says, bursting into laughter. On Twitter after the ban, Anomaly said “I had the skin because me and some friends were gonna record a Minecraft video and I was gonna make a little joke about ‘Meinkraft’ and forgot to change back the skin.”
According to the relevant bits of Twitch’s community guidelines, “hateful conduct is any content or activity that promotes, encourages, or facilitates discrimination, denigration, objectification, harassment, or violence” against people in a wide range of categories, and it’s not hard to see how Twitch might recognise Hitler jokes as – at the very least – ‘facilitating denigration.’
It’s not the first time Anomaly has been banned from Twitch for inappropriate conduct, as Dot Esports notes. Over a year ago, he received an indefinite suspension from the platform for violating the hateful conduct rules.
While we never officially got confirmation on why that ban happened – obviously it was eventually overturned – it did come immediately after a clip in which Anomaly dressed a black PUBG character in prison clothes, and followed with the same sort of exaggerated laugh we hear in the Minecraft clip.
