Replatforming the Deplatformed: A study on the role and response of external actors and communities in the de- and replatformisation of toxic content creators

Tyler Steinkamp, infamously known as Tyler1, is a popular League of Legends streamer and content creator on Twitch and YouTube. He holds a relevant case of a gaming influencer who was deplatformed from the game League of Legends, developed by Riot Games, due to his outrageous behavior and attitude within the game. He is termed to be “The Most Toxic Player in North America”, due to his disruptive in-game behavior that includes constantly harassing and abusing teammates through the chat system, as well as his signature habit of “intentionally feeding” and trolling (Friedman). 

Before his “indefinite ban” in April 2016, several of his accounts got regularly banned as his behavior violated the game’s code of conduct. This indefinite ban by Riot Games was special as it ultimately prevented him from playing the game, which also prevented him from streaming his gameplay on Twitch. However, being deplatformed from his signature game did not prevent him from creating content and streaming, as it allowed him to find new ways to utilise his persona to obtain fame among the League of Legends community. Although he was not able to play the game, he often parodied his own life and hosted his own League of Legends tournament (Tyler1 Championship Series). Off-stream, and even rarely live on stream, Tyler1 still played the game secretly, but if his identity got exposed, that account would be instantly banned. In January 2018, he announced that he will finally be unbanned from the game as he constantly appealed the ban with evidence of his “reformed behavior” (Goslin). His return cemented one of Twitch’s highest number of concurrent viewers of an individual streamer at over 382,000 viewers (Chalk). Tyler1’s unique case presents an example of deplatformisation that enabled an individual to obtain more fame, because in this case deplatformisation and later replatformisation enabled Tyler1 to become one of the most popular Twitch streamer recognised by the gaming community.

The challenges of not only social media platforms but also gaming or streaming platforms pertain to the content moderation regime, as platforms must “moderate the content and activity of users, using some logistics of detection, review, and enforcement” (Gillespie 21). This applies to Tyler1’s deplatformisation case, as he was brought to both judgment and justice by the game’s moderation system giving him a much needed second chance to expand the longevity of his streaming career and undergo the reformation process.
However, since Tyler1 is a prominent public figure within the League of Legends community, whose existence and cohesion rely upon its attention to central human and non-human actors alike, this research and its methodology focus not on the perspective of the content moderator as-is, but rather on the issue network that arose as a result of Tyler1’s deplatformisation and the ways in which their actions ultimately influence the content moderators’ decisions. Before his deplatforming, Tyler1 was already a controversial figure with the community. Afterwards, his name became synonymous with toxic in-game behavior. An example of a phrase that entered the vernacular after originating on Tyler’s stream is ‘running it down mid’, the act of continuously feeding resources to one’s opponents in what is essentially a five versus five resource management game.

This research will attempt to show how a public figure was able to maintain his public status after being deplatformed, how the discourse surrounding this public figure shifted over time, and how not only did this change in discourse lead to the content moderators reconsidering their decision and replatforming this public figure, but also how this allowed him to shift his surrounding narrative in order to become one of the most successful and popular figures within this community. In order to show this process, this research is centered around the following research question:

‘How do external actors respond to and influence the process of de- and replatformisation of content creators?’

In order to answer this question, this research makes use of issue mapping tools as conceptualized by Bruno Latour. As pointed out by Rogers et al. in the introduction of their book on mapping the issue of aging within Europe, Latour ‘suggests that controversies should be taken as a starting point and then the focus should be on the struggle, the action, and the movement.’ (Rogers et al., 16) To employ this, the five types of ‘instructions for the researcher, and the cartographer, to look into in detail’ were applied to this research in varying degrees. (16) 

The first and one of the most important instructions for this research to consider is the idea that “there are no groups, but rather only group formations.” (16) Through this research’s analysis of various platforms on which actors operate to different extents, group formations are constantly being restructured and reconsidered, relating to another Latourian mapping credo: we never act alone in carrying out a course of action; the actor is not the unique source of the action. This insight is key in allowing this research to abstract the League of Legends community into group formations. As Latour writes: “The task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst” (Latour, 23). Our textual analysis shows further that group formations can nearly always be iteratively subdivided during times of controversy, which ties in to another of Latour’s instructions: we are mapping second-degree objectivity. As restated by Tommaso Venturini: “Sociotechnical disputes exist precisely because the actors the actors are incapable to find (or impose) an agreement. In controversies, by definition, there is not [sic] first-degree objectivity” (Venturini, 1). The moment where second-degree objectivity arises - as in this research’s case when people spoke publicly against Riot Games’ decision to ban Tyler1 - so does controversy, as does the opportunity to apply Latourian issue mapping.

Methodology

In order to effectively answer the research question and go about finding the role played by Tyler1’s secondary community, if any, in his de- and replatformisation, a methodology comprising data extraction tools like 4CAT (Peeters and Hagen) & Lippmanian Device, a text analysis software AntConc and visualisation platform DataWrapper was designed.
Tyler1 has a huge social media following, the best way to gauge how people on these platforms responded to and influenced his banning and unbanning was to look at the Reddit board ‘League of Legends’ (LOL). This board is the most apt source for data because it comprises only of LOL enthusiasts and the discussions are limited to the topics around the game. Another major reason, the board has a membership of 30 million+ LOL enthusiasts, many of them who play the game themselves, follow the developments around the game and are a better judge of how the game and gamers like Tyler1 function. 

To start off, all the reddit posts made in the ‘League of Legends’ board using the keyword ‘Tyler1’ were extracted for the period of his banning, i.e., from 30th April 2016 to January 8th 2018. This data extraction was realised using the tool 4CAT (Capture and Analysis toolkit). A close look into this data would help us in better understanding the discourse around his ban and also the talks around his unban. Since Tyler1’s ban-period lasted for around twenty months, the data extracted was divided into ten periods, each consisting of two months. The ten timeframes are listed below (Table 1).

Table 1: Timeframes for each period

Post this, all the data collected under these ten timeframes (the reddit posts) were turned into ten different text corpuses, each corpus had posts from two months and an average of 2000 reddit posts made using the keyword ‘Tyler1’ in the reddit board ‘League of Legends’. Each of these corpuses were run through the text analysis software AntConc to know at-least ten keywords for every timeframe. These ten keywords were what the software terms as ‘unusually frequent’ in the selected corpus of text when compared to other corpuses. The logic behind this exercise was to map those keywords specifically. It was noted that words/phrases like ‘Unban him’ and ‘He’s reformed’ had higher frequencies as time progressed, which establishes the fact that many people joined the chorus in calling for Tyler1’s unbanning over time.

Focusing on the discourse that led to his unbanning, four themes were agreed upon and keywords falling under these four themes were selected. The first theme was to look at the two main actors in the controversy; i.e., Tyler1 and Riot Games. The second theme was to assess Tyler1’s gaming behavior, hence words like Toxic, Int, Run-it-down (a LOL community specific terms) were selected. The third and fourth theme were to look at the negative and positive connotations attached to Tyler1, hence opposing words like “ban” and “unban” were used. The same themes were visualised using the software DataWrapper. 

As an addition to the study, the Reddit usage of these keywords was compared to the usage by news-media sources. To address the prevalence of the keywords obtained through Reddit/4CAT, we will compare it with news outlets to map the response of news websites within Tyler1’s deplatformisation and replatformisation period. Therefore, a list of ten technological, gaming, and esports websites with a high tendency of covering Tyler1’s reforming process needs to be carefully selected to obtain significant results (Table 2). The associative query snowballing technique is a simple method of accumulating associated actors by constructing and reiterating queries to obtain an exhaustive list of actors (Rogers). To build our list of websites, we used the starting queries “esports websites”, “gaming websites”, and “tech websites” on Google. For each query, the top website was selected and added within the query to continue the list building process. Once an exhaustive list of all three categories is created the next step is filtering the list to include websites that existed before 2016. These websites also needed to contain articles that cover Tyler1’s entire reformation period to obtain significant results when queried through the Lippmannian device, because some esports news websites began their business only after Tyler1’s ban in April 2016.

Table 2: List of gaming related news websites

Using the Lippmanian Device developed by the Digital Methods Initiative (Rogers), the keywords extracted from the Reddit posts were queried for the curated lists of news sources to learn how the usage of the selected keywords specific to Tyler1’s ban and unban fared when compared between Reddit posts and news articles. We ran the Lippmannian within the ten predefined periods and set the default search engine to Google with the number of results per query to 100 and kept the default advanced settings. The only metric that will be considered is the results “estimated by Google” to measure the highest possible frequency of keywords appearing on the curated news websites.

The last and the most important exercise, a discourse and contextual analysis of the two keywords used the most with regard to Tyler1’s replatformisation, i.e., “Unban” and “Reformed” was done. Using the tool AntConc, the public discourse around aforementioned two keywords was analysed throughout the ten timeframes, i.e., how has the usage of these words been across the timeframes? In what context are people using these two words? Whether the increased usage of these words tells a story as to how people influenced Tyler1's unbanning was investigated, which further would act as an answer to our research question.

Results & Discussion

Twitch Tracker

Figure 1: Tyler1’s channel statistics provided by Twitch Tracker

The website “Twitch Tracker” provides in-depth statistics about specific Twitch channels such as average viewers, followers, hours streamed, total viewers, and much more. This website is directly connected to Twitch’s API and allows us to collect accurate information about Tyler1’s channel. As we are monitoring Tyler1’s deplatformisation and replatformisation timeline we only focused on scraping his average viewers and followers gained throughout the months to monitor his popularity concerning his deplatformisation status by plotting the scraped numbers on a line graph. The Twitch Tracker had a few limitations as the data available on the website only dates back to November 2016, although Tyler1’s channel was created in 2013. This was due to the limitations and regulations of Twitch’s API and the Twitch Tracker website being considerably new and did not scrape data through the API before its launch. As expected the amount of followers and average viewership of Tyler1 spiked during the month of his replatformisation (January 2018) and gradually stabilised after his return. There were also spikes in November and December of every year, because that is the usual timeframe when he hosts his own League of Legends tournament, but the numbers never came close to the time he was replatformised.

Keyword Frequencies

Figure 2: Keywords on interfering actors on Reddit and news outlets

The frequency of the keywords for the first theme of interfering actors on the r/leagueoflegends board on Reddit and among news outlets are proportional (Figure 2). The frequency is significantly lower among news outlets because we only extracted the keywords from ten news websites. In the case of news outlets, period one had the highest coverage of Tyler1, which indicates that more news articles covered stories of him getting banned as compared to periods nine and ten which is when he got unbanned. Additionally, the frequency of the word Tyler1 and Riot among news outlets are almost identical, because journalists need to convey the entire context of Tyler1’s narrative with Riot Games as an interfering actor. In Reddit’s case, we noticed that the frequency of the word Tyler1 is the highest in period nine which is before he gets unbanned which is slightly higher than when he got banned in period one. Although in Reddit’s case the frequency of the word Riot is not identical there was a spike in period nine, which was when Tyler1 got accused and harassed by a Riot employee.

Figure 3: Keywords about Tyler1’s behavior on Reddit and news outlets

The second theme focuses on keywords that describe Tyler1’s negative behavior (Figure 3), which are all vernacular words that only members within the League of Legends community will recognise. Thus, the results indicate little to no frequency among news outlets due to the nature of these words that are not suitable for journalistic purposes. Although, we notice the word “toxic” being used frequently in periods one, five, nine, and ten indicating its newsworthiness to explain Tyler’s behavior. This also matches with Reddit’s side of the narrative as the word “toxic” is more associated with the reason Tyler1 got banned which is why it is highly used by the community in period one and nine matching the narrative when he got banned and before he got unbanned. The word “run it down” vernacularly refers to his particular act in-game of intentionally feeding resources to the enemy, although it was not used among news outlets, it became frequently used in Reddit during period two after the ban discussed by users for reasons why he actually got banned. Similarly, the word “int” also refers to an in-game act of intentionally dying, which is constantly used on Reddit with spikes during period five revolving around the context of why Tyler1 got banned.

Figure 4: Keywords with negative connotation on Reddit and news outlets

The third theme focuses on words with negative connotations associated with the banning of Tyler1 (Figure 4). Here we instantly notice the spikes in the use case of the word “ban” in periods one, nine, and ten on both Reddit and news outlets. The word “indefinite” also correlates to the word ban which refers to the duration of Tyler1’s ban and its frequency is only high in periods one, nine, and ten which are the most significant periods within Tyler1’s narrative. The same can be applied to the word “punish” that had a spike in period one among news outlets, but constantly spiked on Reddit throughout the periods.

Figure 5: Keywords with positive connotation on Reddit and news outlets

The fourth theme focuses on words with positive connotations associated with the unbanning of Tyler1 (Figure 5). For the word “unban” on Reddit we can notice that its frequency started to gradually increase from periods four onwards with it spiking at periods nine and ten. Among news outlets, it only spiked in periods nine and ten which was when most articles announce the comeback of Tyler1. On Reddit, it also shows the gradual increase in the frequency of the word “freetyler1” indicating the community’s anticipation by demanding Riot to unban Tyler1 who is claiming to be reformed. The frequency of the word “reformed” got constantly used on both Reddit and news outlets throughout the periods with it spiking in periods nine and ten indicating the community’s feedback of him reforming his behavior leading to his replatformisation.

Overall when comparing the frequency of words across all four themes the results point towards the same direction of spikes in the keywords during periods one, nine, and ten which corresponds to the timeline of Tyler1 getting deplatformed and his redemption to become replatformed in period ten. This also corresponds to the Twitch tracker statistics graph (Figure 1), showing spikes in Tyler1’s average viewership and followers gained during his replatformisation. We also notice that the words “toxic” and variations of the word “ban”, “unban”, and “reformed” had the highest overall use case, which implies the significance of these words to Tyler1’s overall narrative that has been talked about by his community on Reddit and among news outlets. The vernaculars, such as #FreeTyler1 and “running it down” are only commonly used within the Reddit community, therefore, they can also be expanded upon to understand a deeper context about the Reddit’s community backlash about Tyler1.

Concordance analysis of r/LeagueofLegends

This section is divided into several smaller parts which will discuss each time period with significant results. These time periods are period one, seven, nine and ten (see Table 1), as each of these yielded significantly more results due to their inherent significance in Tyler’s overall replatforming process.

Figure 6: Sample concordance analysis on AntConc of the word “unban” during period one

Period 1: May/June 2016

The overall context of the post on Reddit suggests and believes that Tyler1 can be unbanned one day when he actually has reformed. A couple of posts suggest that he might not be unbanned anytime soon but maybe within a year and a half. There were also a few posts that demand Riot to unban him immediately threatening they will uninstall the game or never buy RP again. Other posts also mention his ban was not justified claiming that other players are even more toxic than him and most high-level players have worked past toxicity. There were also a few posts suggesting Tyler1 deserved to be banned for eternity even if there is a possibility of unbanning him. This suggests there are some influences to keep him deplatformed even shortly after the ban.

When looking at mentions of the keyword “reformed”, posts show that he is actually trying to be reformed and deserves another chance with some suggesting that Riot should make him a role model to become a person that has fully reformed from toxic behaviors. Some also mention the indefinite or perma ban by Riot is not justified as he did show improvements in his behavior and is reformed. There were also plentiful posts that used the word reformed in a sarcastic way believing that Tyler1 did deserve the ban as well.

Period 7: May/June 2017

A year after Tyler1’s ban, the overall context of the posts discuss the possibility that Riot can one day unban him, because his ban was indefinite as someone in Riot could easily make the decision to unban him immediately. The context behind the word is also paired with other memetic words such as free tyler, give Graves his cigar, and unban Tyler. Many also mention he is an entertaining streamer and one of their favorite streamers so Riot should unban him already. There are still some posts that think he should never be unbanned as well.

The majority of posts mentioning “reformed” point in the same direction saying that Tyler1 has actually reformed and needs to get unbanned. People actually have a more positive image of him now. Many posts actually mention that the real reason he is reformed is for the money he gets from streaming. A lot of posts also mention the success of Riot’s moderation and banning system that actually made him reformed. Surprisingly, there were also posts that compare him with Jensen, stating that he has reformed just like Jensen.

Period 9: September/October 2017

This time period can be seen as a turning point in the process of replatforming Tyler due to several factors, which are directly reflected upon in the text corpus from Reddit. In September 2017, Riot employee ‘Sanjuro’ spoke up regarding Tyler as a person, directly insulting him and using pejorative terms such as “homunculus” to defame him (Scott-Jones). These controversial debates sparked further discussion about Tyler1’s unban, in particular due to his apparently subdued and mature reaction to the situation.

Support for his unban has increased significantly compared to previous time periods, with a majority of comments expressing the need for his unban. However, a large portion of mentions still are skeptical of Tyler1’s behaviour and ‘reform’, somewhat siding with Sanjuro’s statements of his intents with streaming being fueled by monetary gains primarily. Similarly, comparisons with pro player Jensen are made once more, arguing that Tyler has not significantly changed his behaviour similar to Jensen in 2013.

After the controversy surrounding Sanjuro, rumours of Tyler’s upcoming unban grew in numbers, which was later confirmed by Riot in late October 2017. As such, the discussion regarding Tyler’s reform took a turn in his favour and saw greater support than before, once again with a majority of comments asking for Riot to “give Tyler1 a second chance”. In turn, most comments mentioning Sanjuro use the controversial comments made by him to prove and highlight Tyler’s reform process, as well as using Sanjuro’s name as a vehicle for Riot to speed up the replatformisation significantly.

Figure 7: Riot employee ‘Sanjuro’ (marked red) talking about Tyler1 in the League of Legends subreddit Discord.

Period 10: November/December 2017

At this point time, Riot has already contacted Tyler1 regarding the conditions for his eventual unbanning. Reddit posts centered around the unban keyword seem to vary a lot because of this. While most people show positivity towards Tyler1 being unbanned, others were more cynical, saying for example that if a player who was once as toxic as Tyler1 can be unbanned, they should just unban everyone since, according to them, bans are now made meaningless. There were also a lot of posts asking about and explaining the actual conditions of his unbanning.

Most users who employ the ‘reformed’ keyword in this period show positivity regarding Tyler’s unbanning. Some of them however remain skeptical, still saying that Tyler1 merely pretends to be reformed in order to draw attention and only wants to get unbanned for financial reasons. Many people draw comparisons between Tyler and other notorious League of Legends personalities who have been either banned or warned for their behavior in the past, such as Jensen, Gross Gore, Tarzaned, and Doublelift.

Conclusion

This research has discussed the process of de- and replatformisation in light of Tyler1’s streaming career through different lenses. The first part focused on the negative and positive connotations regarding his ban and personality found across different news media and Reddit, which showcased different trends and highlighted the timeline of events that occurred in relation to his ban and unban. Similarly, one can deduce the time periods and actors that were significant in helping Tyler1 get unbanned, as well as a de facto turning point in the overall opinion of Tyler1 as reflected by news media.

Building upon this, the second part focused on the r/LeagueofLegends community and their discussions surrounding Tyler1 across this time period. Interestingly, one can observe a distinct upwards trend in terms of popularity and positivity as Tyler1 employed different methods to interact with the community. Furthermore, the central turning points of popular opinion can be pinpointed to two events, which occurred in period seven and nine respectively, namely a month-long hiatus from streaming that Tyler1 discussed briefly on Twitter, as well as the remarks and aftermath of Riot employee Sanjuro towards Tyler1, which quickly coincided with the unban announcement. In addition, lead Riot employees have disclosed on Reddit and livestreams that the Reddit community has played a role in the replatformisation of Tyler1; however, it has not been disclosed to what extent this holds true, especially as Tyler has also reflected on community discourse regarding him and his personality changes and the role this has played overall.

While these results suggest that the community played a significant role in shaping and attributing new roles to Tyler1’s replatformisation, it is to be noted that opinions remain divisive amongst League of Legends players and his own fan community, as is shown in the final section of the discussion. Although the controversy seems to be solved after Tyler1's replatformisation, there still exists second-degree objectivity regarding the nature of his unbanning to this day. The on-going discussion that arose from Tyler1’s ban is still reflected upon for different League of Legends players that may be in comparable situations.

A major limitation of this research is the lack of tools to collect data through Twitch’s API. Although there are tools available on GitHub, most of these tools require knowledge with coding in order to operate and do not benefit the nature of this research. As of the time when this research was conducted there were no tools hosted on websites that allowed us to scrape a channel’s chat log for more significant results. If we were able to scrape keywords and hashtag directly from Tyler1’s Twitch chat it may have produced more significant results, because his community is more active on Twitch compared to YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. We look forward to the development of research tools on Twitch’s platform because it is one of the largest gaming communities that could benefit researchers predominantly studying Generation Z’s online behavior, use of vernaculars, and social trends that can unfold on Twitch. Now that Donald Trump has also created a Twitch channel (Kaser), it can be a starting point for researchers to develop tools through Twitch’s open API that can highly benefit other researchers and students who are interested in collecting data from this popular platform.