Twitch Streamer Fedmyster Banned After Racist Text to Speech Donation Slipped Through Filter

A Twitch streamer has been handed a seven day ban from the platform, after donation slipped through the text to speech filter and read out a racist term repeatedly.

The context of the donation is critical, as Fedmyster was doing a particularly strange live stream at the time. He was staring at a canvas, with the stream titled ‘Watching Paint Dry’, and would ignore his stream entirely.

This meant that all donations, chat comments, subscriptions etc. he would simply ignore, in an attempt to essentially have the most boring stream ever, ironically of course.

He did however have text to speech donations on, and so a number of viewers would send in donations in an attempt to troll, but a filter was in place to prevent anything offensive coming through.

But one user managed to slip past the filter, and their $2 donation message – the ‘N word’ 18 times – was read aloud for the entire stream to hear.

To resume in ‘character’, Fedmyster completely ignored the donation, making no effort to turn it off and keeping to his rule of ignoring all donations.

And this is almost certainly what has lead to his seven day ban on the platform, as Fedmyster confirmed via a post to his Twitter.

Twitch has been increasingly punitive towards all forms of offensive behavior on streams, even, it seems, when it isn’t the streamer themselves using the offensive language.

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It would appear that he wasn’t necessarily banned for the donation itself, but for not reacting and failing to make an attempt to mute the audio.

It is a strong reminder that relying on the streamlabs filter itself to block out offensive text to speech donations is not a certain way to prevent them coming through.