On March 10, the Arabic-language segment of Twitch was shocked by a wave of bans. The platform blocked the channels of many partners from the MENA region, including dozens of popular content makers. The service itself did not comment on the reasons for the bans. Presumably, this is because of the tax avoidance situation in the Middle East.
According to our Twitch analytics tool, among the blocked streamers are oCMz (427K followers), Ahmed_show (501K followers), Swelyy (592K followers), shongxbong (1.15M followers), RakanooLive (1.59M followers), and many others. Full list of bans is available in our special automated Twitter account @StreamingLogs, and the most recent ones you can find on a special page of our website.
It is worth noting that in late February, several Middle Eastern Twitch streamers said that the streaming platform suddenly stopped giving out payouts. These payouts include all income received from subscriptions and bits. Streamer's emails from Twitch support point to issues “due to a discrepancy with certain tax information provided during the onboarding process”, but there has been no official statement from the platform. And now many of the streamers who complained about this problem are simply banned.
