I have been suspended from the website Twitch since Saturday, Jan 27th 2018 under the reasoning "Porn or Other Sexually Explicit Content Strikes". I filed for an appeal on Monday, January 28th, explaining that the situation was entirely a joke, and not meant to be taken seriously. I made a reference to selling pornography if someone reached an impossible goal of subscribers, and it was taken out of context. 

I joined Twitch in 2015. I started to become serious about streaming in 2017. I had a growing community through twitter and youtube and decided to stream more often. I maintained a 170 viewer average for 2 months, and then 230. I had 25,000 followers and over 400 subscribers. I was applying for partnership every 3 weeks and constantly being declined due to the previous strikes on my account (7) from before I started to take that career path seriously. I asked some admins about the strikes, because they were over a year old, and they told me over time they would expire. I never heard back from them.

I have been in and out of every community online. I am a semi-well known person. I have quite a bit of people who do not like me based on my past experiences, which has created a bubble of hate that follows me wherever I choose to go, even though I have tried my best to stay clean from issues. I get mass reported on every platform, I get watched like a hawk and basically walk on eggshells. I would never go out of my way to hurt anybody yet people treat me like I am a terrible person because of my past. I believe this is also a reason I am forbidden from using Twitch.

After getting serious about streaming in 2017, I was very strict about TOS on my channel. I was sure to never break a rule, because I wanted to be partnered, and make streaming my full time career. After appealing my suspension in February, I did not receive an answer. I waited 3 weeks, sent in another, asking what I did wrong, and no answer again. I was in the process of moving at the time, so I tried to push those issues aside and focused on life for a while.

I first received the response "Due to repeated or severe Terms of Service or Community Guidelines violations, your account is now indefinitely suspended. We do not unsuspend accounts for this level of abuse." so I decided to investigate, because I hadn't gotten banned or had strikes for a while. I talked to some people behind the scenes begging for answers because all of my friends are streamers, and I live with 3 of them, so am I not allowed to communicate with anybody? That is their full time job, that is what they are doing all the time, so am I supposed to just stay in my room and make new friends?

I was told that I have strikes on my account that do not have explanations, or proof. An example being "impersonating staff" which I have never done. I do believe there are strikes on my channel that belong there, but I also believe most of them should have expired. Like I said before, I have been on Twitch for many years, most of those years were spent growing up and changing my views on things. I filed for another appeal on March 25th, 2018. I did not receive a response.

Since then, I have been basically living in the shadows of all of my friends. I cannot talk to any of them during the majority of my day, nor can I support them. I can ban evade and subscribe to their channel, but I do not want to break another rule. I have become tired of being mistreated. I have reasons to believe that there are people within Twitch who are targeting me and making sure that I cannot use the site. I am being treated like an immediate threat to the website. What I did did not deserve a permanent ban, and I want to talk about it. Even if it's some kind of "I can't stream, but I can be on other streams" so I can at least hang out with or talk to my significant other, or walk around my house and talk to my roommates. 

I am making this petition in hopes to at least talk to someone about why they think I do not deserve to use Twitch based on my former actions. Thank you for reading.

-Emma