2024-09-07 10:35:02
Dr Disrespect
As has been teased for several weeks now, Dr. Disrespect, who admitted to inappropriately contacting a minor, has returned to streaming on YouTube. With a lot of caveats.
Dr. Disrespect’s channel was demonetized by YouTube as all this was unfolding, and he says he wants to stay on YouTube, rather than move elsewhere. There were theories perhaps he’d find a home with Kick or Rumble, places that attract…controversial streamers, but that does not seem to have happened. He says he will reapply for monetization at the end of the month, but he can take donations and…people are donating.
This first return stream was watched by 230,000 people right when it launched. 30 minutes or so later that’s dropped to 160,000, and continues to fall. Though that’s still a huge amount. He has restricted chat to subscribers who have been subbed for 13 weeks, an incredibly long time and no doubt to curb those trying to bring up the allegations and his confession in the chat.
He did in fact briefly address the issue at hand, where his stream is called “The Truth” and he has previously deleted his long admission messages where he acknowledges he was banned from Twitch because of inappropriate Twitch Whisper messages he sent to a minor.
His new “explanation” this time is that he had a Twitch partner manager with a “grudge” who scraped those Twitch messages and sent them to Trust and Safety at Twitch, Twitch legal and others within the company with “out of context screenshots” which eventually did in fact lead to his ban. He says that Twitch Trust and Safety originally concluded the messages were not sexting or in violation of child exploitation federal laws, and he says he did not exchange graphic sexual messages or images with the minor, though Trust and Safety ended up banning him regardless.
He says the minor did not want to escalate things to Twitch. Law enforcement agencies determined “he did nothing wrong” and he won his case over the issue with Twitch. He says it was “just banter” after previously, in the deleted message, saying there were conversations with the minor which “leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate.” He claims that Twitch did not look at the age of consent when the messages were received, if that gives you a picture of the kind of technicalities he’s getting into. He made fun of people asking him to release the messages if they were not in fact inappropriate, something he mocked and said “what are we in second grade?”
There were no apologies. He is fully in character as Doc. He started with a game of Wordle and is now trying to get into the Black Ops 6 beta as I write this.
These current viewing numbers are inflated, given that no doubt many people simply wanted to see what he would say and what this first stream back would be like. But it’s clear he will have a loyal core of players which is of course, unsettling given that these aren’t just accusations, he admitted to inappropriately contacting a minor and this new explanation of “someone had a grudge and the age of consent where the messages were received is okay” is not exactly changing anything. But much of his crowd is back to “firm handshakes” and showering praise and adoration of “the Two-Time.”
There is nothing preventing Doc from streaming unless he gets flat-out banned from YouTube, which could still happen. But monetization is another open question as nothing has changed since he was demonetized. He can get these donations, but sponsor deals have no doubt all evaporated for the foreseeable future. He was also kicked out of his own game development company.
His entire stream right now is him reading donations and fawning messages from his viewers. I do not recommend watching.
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