100 signatures reached
To: Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch
Sign now: Urge Twitch to ban military recruiting ads & protect younger users
Young people from all over the world gather on Twitch to play games and build friendship. The use of advertising by the U.S. military violates military recruiting laws and makes young people targets for manipulation and deception by members of the military.
Please ban all military recruiting ads from your platform and let kids have a safe place to have fun.
Why is this important?
The U.S. military is targeting kids — as young as 13! — while they play video games online. The Air Force, Army, and Navy ALL advertise on Twitch, an incredibly popular video game platform that has 140 million users — 45% who are under the age of 18.
Military recruiting laws prohibit recruiting anyone under the age of 16. But this insidious practice targets young people who are vulnerable to abusive online advertising. It’s a blatant violation of recruitment laws and unacceptable.
And Twitch has called them out before — the U.S. Army was recently ordered to stop posting ads for a fake contest designed to get people to hand over their contact information to recruiters. These ads must be stopped.