Last night FaZe Clan’s John “Cizzorz” Cizek, a popular Fortnite and Minecraft streamer, was banned from Twitch with no apparent warning. This marks the latest in a long string of bans seemingly related to DMCA violations.
Cizzorz had over 1.5million followers on the platform prior to being scrubbed from Twitch. As with many recent bans, there appears to have been no communication with the streamer, who posted a short tweet stating he had been banned:
Banned on Twitch
— FaZe Cizzorz (@cizzorz) November 10, 2020
While users are banned on Twitch all the time for a variety of issues, bigger streamers appear to be suffering recently due to a large influx of DMCA claims that were filed to Twitch back in June.
Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani was recently banned under similar circumstances, but has returned to Twitch as of yesterday, stating that music played during a stream many years ago was the reason that the DMCA was raised.
Update: My channel was banned on Twitch on Nov 5th due to music that was played on stream from many years ago (DMCA). Miss everyone alot and hoping for the best as the situation is still being worked on~
— Joedat (@Voyboy) November 9, 2020
Other users such as Bucklington had been banned earlier than VoyBoy, but many have still not been reinstated to the streaming platform at time of writing. The streamer also noted that his DMCA warning was dumped into his spam folder.
Many have been critical of the way that Twitch has been handling bans, as there appears to be no system in place to help creators identify which of their videos contain the content triggering the DMCA bans. Instead, Twitch’s solution to the claims currently seems to be deleting everything in question.
It is INSANE that @Twitch informs partners they deleted their content – and that there is more content in violation despite having NO identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life's work. This is pure, gross negligence. pic.twitter.com/mhdXU5lEc5
— Devin (@DevinNash) October 20, 2020
As with other recent bans they are likely conforming to Twitch’s traditional “three strikes” rule, but due to the volume of DMCA claims that the platform is rumoured to be processing simultaneously, users have been left with little chance of recourse in the short term.
Despite the increase in bans, Twitch Support has been quiet on the matter since it recently made material available to help content creators back on October 20. It seems likely that there will be plenty more bans in the future, and streamers are understandably quite tense due to the lack of warning.