Veteran Twitch streamer Chance ‘Sodapoppin’ Morris has been unbanned from the platform, after a controversial suspension on April 14.
Although the exact cause of the suspension was never confirmed, as Twitch does not reveal bans publicly, and Sodapoppin did not address it, fans speculated that it was caused by a controversial ‘black face’ joke.
Soda had been applying make-up to a character’s face in a game, when he said “hmm, black face.” He went on to give the character a minstrel-like appearance.
The clip was shared to Reddit, where Sodapoppin offered an explanation, saying he “didn’t notice how that correlated at the time I was just throwing random make-up on the face.”
“In hindsight, I see how that yea, it’s like an extreme blackface. I didn’t mean for it to get racist sounding/looking as it did but yea this was just me being naive and not realizing how the mouth correlated with the skin etc.”
Sodapoppin’s Twitch suspension lifted
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his account was banned shortly after the incident, although with no response from Soda, it was unclear how long the suspension would last.
As of April 28, his channel has been reinstated on Twitch, meaning he was given a forced break for exactly two weeks, and is now free to return to streaming on his partnered account.
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In his decade on the platform, Sodapoppin has been banned on multiple occasions.
Perhaps most infamously, he was suspended for breaking sexual content guidelines, after a VR Chat stream. He responded with a tongue-in-cheek apology video that quickly went viral.
Although Twitch rarely suspends long-time, established streamers permanently, it is a risk that streamers take if they receive multiple suspensions.
Sodapoppin will need to be careful to avoid future community guidelines violations or could risk a much longer time out on the sidelines, or even an indefinite ban.