Leading live streaming platforms Twitch and Kick have been banned in Turkey, allegedly because of concerns that they promote gambling.
The news first hit last week, on February 21, when journalist Ibrahim Haskoloğlu tweeted that Kick was blocked in the country.
“Turkish officials I spoke to stated that Kick’s entry into Turkey was to attract Turkish youth to roulette,” he wrote (translation by Google). Two days later, the same fate greeted Twitch. Haskoloğlu said that the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority began looking at Twitch after Kick streamers complained that gambling was going on there, as well.
Looking up the Twitch.tv on Turkey’s government site, confirms the ban: “twitch.tv has been blocked by the decision dated 22/02/2024 and numbered 2024/7 of Milli Piyango İdaresi Genel Müdürlüğü.”
Twitch famously banned unregulated gambling streams in October 2022. The previous year, the site prohibited the sharing of links and referral codes to sites that offer slots, roulette, or dice games. Last fall, though, Twitch took it another step and banned certain gambling streams altogether.
Not all gambling was put on the black list. Specifically, Twitch banned streams of “gambling sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games that aren’t licensed in the U.S. or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protections.”
Sports betting, poker, and fantasy sports streams are still allowed. And, as the description above says, many gambling sites can still be streamed. The real aim of the rule was to get rid of streams of crypto casino sites like Stake, Duelbits, Rollbit, and Roobet, which had also become the most popular gambling streams on Twitch.
There are still plenty of streamers showing their gambling sessions. As I write this, “Casino” is the 18th-most popular category on Twitch, “Slots” is 22nd, and “Virtual Casino” is 26th. Poker is 51st.
Kick, backed by the co-founders of Stake, picked up Twitch’s slack because of course it would, as like I said a few words ago, it is backed by the co-founders of a huge crypto casino site. Many of Twitch’s biggest gambling streamers like Trainwreck moved over to Kick and reportedly got huge sums of money to do so.
Kick has been able to attract big-name streamers by offering much higher pay percentages than Twitch, but it is also notorious for letting streamers do or say just about anything they want. The combination of the two often gives rise to antisemitism, racism, and misogyny by very popular streamers as well as their viewers in chat. Those sorts of things still happen on Twitch, but with less oversight, they are much more rampant on Kick and are, arguably, part of the site’s strategy to attract viewers.