Twitch drops Donald Trump’s ban

The former president is back on Twitch.

Credit: NICK OXFORD / AFP via Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump — once again officially the Republican candidate for president — is no longer banned from Twitch, the streaming platform.

Trump was banned indefinitely back in 2021 after the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol. His ban was somewhat quietly lifted on Friday — as seemingly the entire online infrastructure melted down due to the CrowdStrike outages. The reason Trump’s allowed back? Well, after this week’s Republican National Convention, he’s officially the presidential nominee and thus, Twitch reasoned, newsworthy enough to be brought back.

“We reinstated former President Trump’s Twitch channel,” said a Twitch spokesperson, via The Verge. “We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for US president.”

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Trump could find himself in hot water with Twitch again, however, because he will be subject to the company’s normal community guidelines. The former president has proven time and again that abiding by such guidelines proves to be a difficult task for him.

“We continue to enforce our Community Guidelines and take necessary enforcement action when we identify violations of our rules,” the Twitch spokesperson said. “Twitch doesn’t have a ‘public figure policy,’ meaning all channels are equally subject to our guidelines, regardless of whether the channel belongs to a public figure.”

You’d be forgiven if you thought Twitch had already made this move — many of the other social media sites have already allowed Trump to return. YouTube and Elon Musk’s X dropped the bans and Meta recently removed heightened suspension penalties previously in place for Trump’s Instagram and Facebook pages.

In short: Trump is fully back online.

Tim Marcin is a culture reporter at Mashable, where he writes about food, fitness, weird stuff on the internet, and, well, just about anything else. You can find him posting endlessly about Buffalo wings on Twitter at @timmarcin.

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