League of Legends streamer, coach and overall source of game knowledge, Nick "LS" De Cesare was recently banned from Twitch because his chat spammed "내가" which literally means "I" or "me" in Korean, but sounds like a racial slur in English.
Twitch chats of the popular livestreamers are usually filled with people who are looking to bypass the platform's racial, homophobic, transphobic and other slurs as well as other ways of offensive language by combining emotes, images and other languages in order to make their message visible to the world.
To counteract these "evolutions" of Twitch chat, streamers are often forced to use bots or human moderators in order to not get themselves banned. LS didn't have enough such measures in place apparently as his chat started spamming Korean version of "I".
To clear the Korean pronoun thing up, it sounds like "nae-gah" when pronounced correctly, as you can hear in Google translate. You can see where the conflict arose when LS figured out what his chat was spamming. The bit that got LS banned is probably the where he laughs at this filter bypass his chat found. But to be honest, it is a reaction pretty many people would have at that point due to the situation's absurdity and not because it's racism.
Twitch banned LS for apparent racism regardless, even though he was known in community to oppose it. He's a Caucasian male living in Korea after all, which would be a hard feat to pull off if he were a racist. Anyway, the ban visibly shook LS up, due to livestreaming being his main source of income, which he explained in a series of tweets, where he also asked people not to flame Twitch staff for the ban.
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The following day, Twitch informed LS that the ban is temporary and will last for one week and he announced he would be preparing a new moderation team for streams in the future. It's still rather absurd, not only that the chat found such a silly way for bypassing racism filters, but also that Twitch banned LS for this apparent infraction.
Are they going to ban Tekken 7 next because Negan from The Walking Dead will join the roster and his name sounds offensive? Technically they could also ban Korean language until their pronouns no longer sound racist in English, but then it would be racism towards Korean people as well, right?
League of Legends - showcase of several champion splash arts
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