President Donald Trump’s Twitch account is temporarily suspended from posting because of “hateful conduct,” Twitch said Monday.
Trump’s Twitch account is another social platform for his campaign to distribute videos, including rebroadcasts of older events and rallies. One of the offending videos was a recording of the now-infamous rally where Trump said Mexico was “sending rapists” to the United States.
Gaming reporter Rod Breslau first reported the news.
Twitch told TheWrap, “Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch. In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed.”
Twitch also provided TheWrap a copy of the offending statements. In addition to his statements regarding Mexicans entering the United States, Trump also broke Twitch’s content guidelines with comments at a recent Tulsa rally.
During the Tulsa gathering, Trump made the following remarks regarding people calling the police: “Hey, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the morning and a very tough, I’ve used the word on occasion, hombre, a very tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do. And you call 911 and they say, ‘I’m sorry, this number’s no longer working.’ By the way, you have many cases like that, many, many, many. Whether it’s a young woman, an old woman, a young man or an old man and you’re sleeping.”
Twitch said it also told President Trump’s team that it violated its guidelines in a statement that mirrors the one provided to TheWrap.
Trump’s Twitch page is now unavailable, but the campaign launched the page in October 2019 in an effort to court younger, tech-savvy potential voters. Prior to its suspension, the Twitch page regularly made use of the site’s built-in ecommerce features and sold Trump campaign and unofficial White House merchandise. One of Trump’s first videos on Twitch attracted over 50,000 viewers.
The Trump campaign’s director of communications Tim Murtagh encouraged the President’s Twitch fans to migrate to the campaign’s mobile app instead. “To hear directly from the President, people should download the Trump app and text ‘Trump’ to 88022,” Murtagh told TheWrap.