You wouldn’t think Twitch and online gambling would ever appear in the same sentence, along with addiction.
You would think wrong. One of the more popular Twitch categories deals with crypto slots and folks worry it is addictive. Seems no matter when you visit Twitch, someone is spinning online slots for hours. The worst part is they lose thousands of dollars. And even worse, thousands of people may be watching this.
The flashy symbols roll by over and over, with the streamers hoping for just the right combination to bring their total back up. Often, thousands of people are watching as it happens.
And so, people want the platform shelved for promoting bad behavior.
Pokimane, a Twitch streamer, said there are better options for income that
don’t have ethics and morals concerns.
“We absolutely believe that the current environment leads to and likely exasperates gambling addiction among vulnerable viewers, both adults and in particular children or adolescents,” Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, told BuzzFeed News.
He also said evidence shows that watching gambling can lead to a desire to gamble.
“You tend to take less precautions and you may be more likely to engage in that activity,” Whyte said.
The other issue is one of legality. One of the more popular slots platform on Twitch is Stake, which uses cryptocurrency, illegal in the U.S.
“It’s very clear that there is a highly monetized ecosystem of referrals and rakebacks and paid promotion that provides very deceptive gambling content with no transparency, and high risk for abuse among the promoters and addiction among the viewers,” said Whyte.
