The US Army's Twitch channel might be violating viewers first amendment rights by banning them. The bans came after viewers started asking the soldiers on the stream about war crimes committed by the U.S. military in chat.
Over the last few months, the military has been shifting a lot of their recruitment efforts to online platforms. One of those platforms has been Twitch, where they have been actively recruiting to kids as young as 13 using misleading job opportunities and recruitment forms disguised as controller giveaways. These behaviors, which have been across several branches of the armed forces, mixed with a tweet by the Army's Esports team where they said "UwU" and a heart emoji have lead many disgruntled citizens to seek out the Army's Esports Twitch channel and troll it with questions of war crimes.
Related: US Military Recruiting Teens, Running Fake Giveaways On Twitch
According to The Washington Post, the Army's choice to ban all those who mentioned war crimes in their chat may have been a violation of the 1st amendment's free speech clause. The Army, as an extension of the federal government, can not stop people from talking in a public forum because they disagree with or dislike what those people are saying. Similarly, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that President Donald Trump could not block his critics on Twitter, as "excluding people from an otherwise public forum such as this by blocking those who express views critical of a public official is, we concluded, unconstitutional." The Army Esports team is not streaming while they review their "policies and procedures".
An Army spokesperson, Lisa M. Ferguson, has come out with a statement arguing that the Army was not "regulating viewpoints of participants," but instead they were controlling the time, place, and manner of the discussion and keeping things "apolitical." Vera Eidelman, an attorney for ACLU, has argued back that the Army's defense does not work due to how relevant the topic of war crimes is to the Army and how public the forum of Twitch is. She goes on to say that it's obvious that the actual reason they are banning people is because they don't like the comments, which is not a constitutional reason to censor them.
The legality of the Army's actions will most likely come into clearer view as this story develops. The ACLU also might take the Army to court over this as they took the US President to court over blocking Twitter users. No matter what, after a public backlash such as this, the Army should now realize that they are fundamentally different from any other civilian streaming group. They need to be more careful in their actions and make sure they are meeting not only Twitch's guidelines but also the constitutions. If it's not too much to ask, maybe they could also stop trying to erase the history of their war crimes.
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Source: Washington Post
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