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While talking about Twitchcon recently, Valkyrae revealed that she was shadow banned on the website. Shadow banning is when someone is banned in almost every sense of the word, but they aren't outright prevented from using the platform altogether. She can still stream there, but as of this writing, her account does not come up in searches.
The streamer and Ramee discussed this, but not everyone is convinced that this is the real reason why the streamer doesn’t come up in searches on Twitch anymore.
Valkyrae and Ramee talk about being shadow banned on Twitch
On March 11, 2022, Valkyrae was streaming with Ramee, and the topic of discussion was Twitchcon. Ramee wasn’t sure if he could go to the convention, since he now streams on Facebook, and she assured him that wasn’t the case.
After saying it would be messed up if they banned people from attending simply because they stopped streaming on Twitch, she just blurted out:
“I’m shadow banned on Twitch.”
The streamer said that if you search for Valkyrae on Twitch, her profile will no longer show up in the results. Only another user with a similar name, and Sykkuno, showed up.
Wanting to verify what she said, Ramee searched for Valkyrae during the stream and sure enough, she didn't show up in the search results. Fans will have to go directly to the stream via a link to view her channel at all.
Valkyrae added:
“It’s annoying because there are people who still think I stream on Twitch, but if you could go to my Twitch page, it would say 'Oh I stream on YouTube now', but I can’t even advertise that.”
However, there are users who don’t quite agree with the streamer's statement. According to some YouTube commenters, the streamer is just an inactive user on the platform instead of a shadow banned one.
YouTube commenters disagree on Valkyrae being shadow banned
Some users felt Twitch was just being petty, and that the platform really did shadow ban the streamer, though there were far more dissenting opinions on the topic.
Some users said that if a shadow ban was in place, it’s smart. This is because the algorithm should only be recommending content that’s relevant. This led to a heated discussion on whether or not the move would be petty.
One viewer argued that it was Valkyrae's choice to leave Twitch, and since she left, the account has been inactive and should fall off the search results just like everyone else's does. That way, they felt, the search engine would not end up cluttered with accounts that don’t stream anymore.
The popular opinion was that Valkyrae was not shadow banned but was inactive on Twitch; that if she returned to streaming on Twitch, the algorithm would likely pick her back up and she would show up when someone searched for her name.
Pettiness on the part of Twitch did come up again, but a user argued that it would be a bad move for Twitch to just let her openly redirect traffic to another platform.
The prevailing opinion appears to be that Valkyrae is not, in fact, shadow banned, but merely inactive on the platform. Another commenter thought it was what they saw as a hot take with no substance behind it.
Unfortunately, there’s not going to be an easy way to substantiate the claims of a shadow ban unless the streamer runs a stream or two on Twitch to see if anything changes. That isn’t likely to happen either, depending on what her YouTube contract dictates. The social media sentiment, however, is that she isn’t shadow banned; just inactive.
