The past few months have been rough for Twitch streamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys, as the 24-year-old found herself repeatedly amid controversies. She was held under fire by popular YouTube personalities like LeafyIsHere, It’sAGundam, diesel patches and many other channels on the platform.
The YouTubers put forward a number of arguments against Pokimane in their videos and called her a “hypocrite” for taking down other content creators’ videos due to lack of “transformative content” while simultaneously posting low-effort content herself. She was also accused of actively trying to “censor the internet” by Leafy, who claimed that if people tried to upload anything negative about the streamer, their content would be taken down by her.
Following these accusations, several Twitch streamers came to defend Pokimane saying the accusations were baseless, which created a sort of rift between a part of YouTube and Twitch content creators. It reached a point where people were getting banned off Pokimane’s discord even if they mentioned the name of the mentioned YouTube channels. Soon, Pokimane decided to take a temporary break from creating content which she announced through her Twitter.
On August 19th, only weeks after she declared her “break”, she issued a public apology video on YouTube for her past behavior. She came upfront with her viewers and acknowledged her mistakes, addressing all allegations against her and explaining them throughout her 16-minute long video.
It wasn’t before long that the YouTube commentary channels shared their thoughts on Pokimane’s apology. They mentioned how the apology wasn’t enough and just a restatement of her previous apology videos. However, soon after these incidents, on August 21st, YouTuber LeafyIsHere received an indefinite ban from YouTube for “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting content designed to harass, bully, or threaten.”
