Over the past couple of days, you may have seen clips of Snoop Dogg streaming on Twitch, enveloped in a cloud of marijuana smoke. Typically, that kind of behaviour would get you banned from the platform, and your stream pulled down.
Just a friendly reminder that Call of Duty: Ghosts had marijuana-themed content and a Snoop Dogg announcer pack.
Yet Snoop’s stream, a promotional broadcast of the game SOS, stayed up, with around 80,000 viewers for the duration. Twitch’s community guidelines say that “any content or activity featuring, encouraging, or soliciting illegal activity is prohibited,” as is “self-destructive behaviour,” including “the use of illegal drugs.” So how did Snoop get away with it?
The answer stems from the fact that Californian Law has recently changed to allow the sale of recreational marijuana, meaning that in Snoop’s house, he wasn’t engaging in illegal activity (assuming he bought the drugs from a licensed dispensary). Despite the change in law, however, Twitch are still a little tetchy about the use of marijuana on their platform. Last year, a Reddit user received a message that read “we discourage broadcasters from the use of marijuana on our services. If doing so violates your local laws, causes you to inflict harm upon yourself, or is a focus of your broadcasts, this activity is entirely prohibited from broadcast.”
Slightly more awkwardly, it seems that while Snoop was perfectly within his rights to smoke on stream, he might not have actually been playing the game. Another redditor captured this clip of Snoop lighting a spliff while his character visibly moves around on the stream behind him.