Disguised Toast's TV Meta Ban Is The Worst Yet
It's not uncommon for Twitch metas to rise and fall in popularity. As such, major streamers will often jump around to different categories as viewers want to see different things. In recent weeks, the television meta — in which streamers watch television programs and react to them — has been huge, with "Master Chef" being the show of choice for many streamers. The problem is that the show is blatantly copyrighted material — as are pretty much all television shows. Now, major streamers are starting to get hit with the banhammer for participating. Pokimane was handed a brief ban for watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" on stream. Now Disguised Toast has been hit, and it's much worse than the 48-hour ban that Pokimane saw.
On January 10, Streamer Bans tweeted out the news that Disguised Toast had been suspended. The replies were quick to explain that the ban was copyright-related and that Toast was kicked off while he was watching the popular anime "Death Note." According to viewers, this ban occurred after a massive number of episodes of "Naruto" and "Death Note" had been watched on-stream.
Later, Disguised Toast tweeted to let fans know that the ban would last for a month. This drew outrage from a number of Toast's viewers, some of whom pointed out that others' DMCA bans were much shorter. However, it seems as though Toast himself took the ban in stride.
It seems like Disguised Toast expected this to happen
While some Twitch bans have been completely bogus, Disguised Toast's was generally seen as warranted. That didn't stop some people from arguing against it, Toast's friend Valkyrae, who tweeted, "FREE TOAST."
In the thread below Streamer Bans' tweet, some fans argued that Disguised Toast had purposefully streamed the shows in order to "push the boundaries of react content." According to these commenters, he fully expected on getting banned from the start and continued to stream the content until then. If true, this may put a few things into perspective, such as Toast's seemingly sarcastic response to Valkyrae's tweet: "can't believe it happened, did not see [the ban] coming at all."
If Toast was really trying to test Twitch's limits, that could explain why his ban is longer than Pokimane's. As some Twitter users pointed out, Pokimane didn't stream nearly the same amount of copyrighted content as Toast. And because it's the internet, there were also plenty of jokes going around. DaSouperNova summed up the situation by tweeting, "Twitch really making offlinetv really offline," referring to the organization that includes Poki and Toast as members.
With more major streamers getting hit with bans related to the meta, there's a good chance it could fizzle away in the near future. Some streamers, like Amouranth, are already steering clear from the controversial meta.