Twitch Bans ‘PogChamp’ for Ties to Capitol Violence

Following the recent violence incited at the Capitol on January 6th of this year, famous streaming service Twitch bans the popular emote “PogChamp”. After the person who the emote is based on had “encouraged further violence” after the U.S Capitol riot.

On January 7th, 10:12 AM twitch released its official statement on why they had decided to ban the emote. “We’ve made the decision to remove the PogChamp emote following statements from the face of the emote encouraging further violence after what took place in the Capitol today.”
Twitch had decided to ban the emote after Ryan Gutierrez, the person in the emote, published a series of tweets on January 6th calling upon more “civil unrest” after Ashli Babbit was shot at the Capitol during the riots.
“PogChamp” is one of the oldest and famous emotes in twitch culture utilized by viewers whenever the twitch streamer had done something extremely cool or noteworthy. Shortened variants such as “poggers” or “pog” have also become synonymous with gaming culture and streaming platforms like Twitch. When watching Twitch, you can see people pogging in the chat.
The response to this ban is extremely mixed. While some people think that the actions taken by twitch were not strict enough, many people from the community also think the ban was uncalled for. Richie, a 10th grader who uses Twitch and other streaming sites, said that the ban was “uncalled for” because of many trends companies have taken to become more “politically correct”. However, Frank, a 12th grader who games a lot, said that it was “totally fine because Twitch is its own corporate entity and Ryan Gutierrez had breached Twitch’s hateful conduct.”
Twitch had banned the original “PogChamp” emote and is finding ways to not lose its hype culture. However, it does raise the question of whether or not these actions are a sort of censorship towards freedom of speech on social media. With the huge rise in cancel culture and companies starting to keep themselves politically correct, many of their actions end up being disingenuous and useless. The emote was banned over a tweet “Gootecks” had published and not over something he had said on Twitch itself. So how justified was the ban?