A home-grown streaming giant should be a reason to celebrate

Kick.com is an Australian company with grand ambitions: to become the world’s largest site for live-streamed entertainment.

But since it was founded two years ago, Kick has repeatedly shown itself incapable of preventing extreme content on the site, from sexualised interactions with children to racist, antisemitic and homophobic speech.

Marketing itself as more permissive than Twitch, the industry’s dominant live-streaming site, Kick appears unwilling to enforce basic standards.

Kick.com, headquartered in Melbourne, was co-founded by 29-year-old Australian billionaire Edward Craven.

Most social media companies are headquartered overseas, making accountability more difficult. Kick, on the other hand, is a home-grown operation, headquartered in Melbourne’s CBD.

It was founded and remains co-owned by 29-year-old Edward Craven, who made his estimated $4.7 billion fortune through the international gambling platform, Stake.com.

Reporting by the Herald’s Patrick Begley this year showed Stake sent messages encouraging foreign players to keep gambling even after they expressed distress and said they wanted to stop. Stake denies any wrongdoing.

The casino promotes itself via Kick by paying influential streamers to gamble online in front of their viewers.

But while the gambling streams have attracted criticism, Kick has hosted more obviously harmful material.

A Herald investigation in May highlighted a number of cases where streamers had engaged in sexually inappropriate behaviour with children online.

The company at the time said it was dedicated to providing a safe online community through its 24/7 content moderation team.

By any measure, Kick has failed.

Reporting by Begley, published today, shows a litany of examples where streamers and commenters have crossed into hateful and dehumanising speech. The Herald does not suggest Craven personally agrees with these views.

But the platform’s most prominent streamer, American Adin Ross, has a history of making transphobic and homophobic statements. Last week, he said, “Give me a gay son, I’mma [sic] have his ass beat a few times and make him straight.”

Ross, 24, is Jewish but has regularly featured guests known for antisemitism, including white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Another guest, who goes by the name Sneako, has used Kick to spread Holocaust denial, to perform a Heil Hitler salute and to praise the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as an “absolute hero”.

Kick in a statement said: “The presence of a particular streamer on Kick does not mean we endorse their views” and that the site had clear rules on hate speech. But Kick must respond to unanswered questions about why the content is allowed to remain online.

The federal government has promised to do more to protect children from social media harms, including by introducing a minimum age limit. It has also appointed a special envoy to combat rising antisemitism.

At the same time, Kick streamers and users are putting out blatantly antisemitic messages on a platform that attracts a large teenage audience.

Craven this year attended an exclusive fundraising dinner for the federal Labor Party.

If the government is happy to dine with Craven, it should also be asking him tough questions about the safety standards on his site.

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