In the light of recent events, two rising Hololive Vtuber Idols have been banned from streaming on youtube for 3 weeks along with no activity on Twitter for the same period of time by Cover Corp. Kiriyu Coco, the highest revenue-generating Vtuber, and Akai Haato, an eccentric streamer from Australia, both of whom have become the face of Hololive for overseas fans because of their ability to communicate in both Japanese and English.
Cover Corp has released a statement regarding the cause of the ban along with more details about how they plan on both punishing and reforming them so that similar mistakes don’t happen in the coming future.
What Is The Ban About?
On the 27th of September 2020, the official Twitter Account of Cover Corp along with the YouTube Account of the Idols released an apology for the “controversial implications” and “Unauthorised disclosure of YouTube Channel analytics”. The main issue revolved around the fact that during a live stream, both the idols revealed statistics regarding the percentage of viewership based on different regions, and in those statistics both China and Taiwan were listed as separate regions. This was not well received by the Chinese viewers as the situation between China and Taiwan has been a very touchy subject.
The Akai Haato Stream was private to prevent more people from watching it and as for the Kiriyu Coco Stream, it was cut from the 2:47 mark, as that was the timestamp as to when the controversial implications were made.
The Chinese Government believes Taiwan is a part of China and on the other hand, Taiwan is pretty much its own country aside from the pending official declaration of independence. Obviously, the reason for banning these Idols was to ensure that the Chinese market for the company isn’t harmed but also as damage control to protect their star Idols as they were receiving death threats and other hostile responses. It is important to know that, these streamers didn’t actively try to bring up or address these issues on their streams and that although in the statement released by Cover Corp it says “unauthorized disclosure of YouTube Channel analytics” but other streamers from Hololive have previously shared the same information with no problem whatsoever.
China And Taiwan Diplomatic Relations
The root of this whole fiasco lies in the very strained diplomatic relations between China and Taiwan. China has risen to be a superpower in modern times in relation to trade, technology, and even various markets like mobile gaming, etc. The situation in Hong Kong as well as Taiwan has been the focal point of recent protests, as both these states want to become liberated from the control of the Chinese Government.
Taiwan has been suffering for a very long time for many years as they are unable to claim independence from China as China has clearly stated that if any organization or country supports Taiwan as an individual country, it will not be allowed to trade or get involved with China whatsoever.
China has also been dead set on the reunification of Taiwan and Hongkong under its control and has been advocating the “One China Policy ” but it hasn’t been successful, instead that very Policy has been the cause for many riots and protests by the people.
