Twitch has banned its most popular streamer, Kai Cenat, from the platform as of Monday, April 17. This is the second Twitch ban that Kai Cenat received in 2023.
While his Twitch streaming career only started in 2021, the 21-year-old content creator is already one of the biggest names in the business. The latest piece of evidence attesting to his celebrity status arrived in February, when Kai Cenat hit a remarkable subscription milestone which only two other people managed to date.
Kai Cenat's career has now hit a bit of a roadblock after Twitch banned his channel on April 17. Amazon's streaming service has yet to provide a specific reason for its decision, but precedent suggests this suspension is only temporary. Not least because three out of four of Kai Cenat's past bans lasted no longer than three days each. His most severe suspension to date happened just over a year ago, when Twitch banned Kai Cenat for 30 days. This prompted the famous content creator to claim he was "done" with the platform before returning to his regular streaming schedule a month later.
Social media reactions to this development range from bafflement to jokes about how Twitch disliked its rival Kick's gift to Kai Cenat which he opened during one of his recent streams. Looking at the streamer's latest broadcasts, this newest ban might have been prompted by the fact that he rode a dirt bike indoors earlier this week. The Twitch Community Guidelines explicitly forbid content that in any way endangers anyone's life or glorifies actions that could lead to physical harm for any reason; riding a motorcycle through a living room presumably qualifies for this definition of endangerment.
The anti-endangerment provision is also at the center of the leading theory explaining Kai Cenat's first Twitch ban in 2023, seeing how that suspension was handed out within days of him passing out during one of his late January broadcasts. However, the streaming platform never outright confirmed that theory as it's not in the habit of commenting on individual bans. It remains to be seen whether Kai Cenat himself sheds some light on this issue as Twitch tends to provide content creators with brief explanations for their suspensions.
Many streamers criticized those clarifications as insufficiently transparent over the years, but that doesn't change the fact that Kai Cenat likely knows a bit more about his current predicament than what he told the fans so far. In the meantime, a vocal portion of his fandom is currently calling for him to make a move to Kick in the aftermath of this development. While Kick repeatedly vowed never to hand out poorly explained bans, its Community Guidelines are fairly similar to that of Twitch, making it dubious whether Kai Cenat's dirt bike stunt would have been permitted on that platform.
Source: StreamerBans, Twitch