The US armed forces just can’t seem to place themselves in the right light when it comes to streaming on Twitch. The US Army’s Twitch channel has been at the center of several different controversies recently, including banning users over asking about war crimes, and now the US Navy’s Twitch is streaming games with inappropriate player names.
The popularity of the video game Among Us has spiked in a huge way since its release over two years ago, so the Navy decided to stream it over on its Twitch channel. As a social deduction game, Among Us requires players to create tags that display what they want to be called in-game. That way, they can identify, clear, and accuse each other whenever a murder happens.
Several of the players in the US Navy‘s Among Us Twitch stream decided to create tags that reference events or slurs that most would find offensive. Two players gave themselves names referring to World War 2 tragedies, with one calling themselves “Nagasaki,” and the other claiming “Japan 1945.” Both names refer to the atomic bombings of Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Another player decided to use a more niche tag and called themselves “Gamer Word.” They somehow managed to make it worse by picking the black color for their character. For those unaware, “Gamer Word” refers to the n-word. It can actually refer to the number of offensive things infamously said by players, but the n-word is what it usually boils down to. The term became popular back when some PewDiePie fans tried to use it as an excuse for his use of the racial slur. They claimed the YouTuber was just using a ‘gamer word,’ so it was fine.
It’s curious how this particular US Navy Twitch stream managed to happen without any of its participants pointing out it was a bad idea beforehand, especially considering the US Army’s Twitch recruitment channel is still recovering from the war crimes scandal. The US Navy was technically a part of this scandal too, since it defended the Army when it happened, so the fact that this stream exists is certainly head-scratching.
It’ll be interesting to see how Twitch handles this situation. The platform has made it one of its goals to be more proactive in upholding its own policies. It was willing to suspend Donald Trump’s Twitch channel over a similar situation, so there’s no reason to think it won’t do the same to the US Navy’s.
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