WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY
Racist, homophobic and antisemitic hate speech, including Holocaust denial, has been allowed to spread freely on an Australian live-streaming platform co-owned and run by 29-year-old billionaire Edward Craven.
According to three former staff, racial and homophobic slurs were also part of the office culture at the site’s Melbourne CBD headquarters, where co-workers allegedly referred to African-American creators using the word “n----r”.
Kick.com, headquartered in Melbourne, was co-founded by 29-year-old Australian billionaire Edward Craven.
Kick.com, which has emerged as the world’s second-largest live-streaming site, says it does not tolerate hate speech and provides 24/7 content moderation by human staff and artificial intelligence tools.
But a streamer who had denied the Holocaust on another channel has been allowed his own account, which he has used this week to make a Hitler salute and praise a Hamas leader as “an absolute hero”.
Kick’s most well-known creator, American Adin Ross, who claims to be paid more than $10,000 an hour, recently hosted a debate on the topic “is homosexuality bad?”
Last week he told his viewers that if he had a gay son, he would have punished him to turn him straight.
Adin Ross, on the right in the smaller inset screen, hosted a debate, whose topics included “Is homosexuality bad?” with white supremacist Nick Fuentes (right) arguing it was.
The site has also failed to moderate discriminatory user comments about Muslims, African-Americans, Indians and Jews, including grotesque caricatures of hook-nosed characters.
Craven launched Kick in 2022, having already built his fortune through Stake.com, the international casino and sports betting platform that has made him richer than News Corp chairman Lachlan Murdoch.
Worth $4.7 billion, according to The Australian Financial Review, Craven is building Melbourne’s most expensive home, a Toorak mega-mansion, on a property he purchased for $88 million.
And while the Stake casino must block Australian players by law, the businessman has become involved in domestic politics, appearing in May at an exclusive Labor Party fundraiser alongside Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.
The dinner, reported by the Herald Sun, was to raise funds for Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah, who has called gambling a “a real scourge” and who last year gave a passionate speech in parliament against antisemitism.
A spokesperson for Ananda-Rajah told this masthead the MP had “has made clear her concerns on the rise of antisemitism in Australia” and that there was no place in Australia for hate speech, including online.
The fundraiser took place after investigations by the Herald and The Age revealed allegations Stake had taken advantage of problem gamblers, which Stake has denied, as well as multiple examples where Kick had broadcast sexually inappropriate behaviour involving minors.
Kick’s 24-year-old star
Styled as a more permissive alternative to Twitch, the industry’s dominant live-streaming platform, Kick has made a name for itself by sponsoring a Formula 1 racing team and signing streamers with highly lucrative contracts.
Kick sponsors the Sauber Formula 1 team.Credit: Kick
While the focus is on live entertainment, video recordings are also stored for 30 days on Kick for viewers to watch on-demand.
One of the antisemitic emotes used on Kick.com, now banned following questions from this masthead.
Craven is heavily involved in Kick’s operations, hosting online discussions about content moderation policy and personally dealing with Ross, whom he calls a friend.
In a sign of Kick’s growing reach, Ross hosted an interview with Donald Trump in August, presenting him with a gold Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck emblazoned with an image of the former president in the moments after the July assassination attempt.
Ross, a 24-year-old Florida resident, has a history of making transphobic comments, such as “my pronouns is [sic] kill/them”.
This year, Ross appeared on another streamer’s channel, shouting “kill yourself, f--”.
Last week, he said, “Give me a gay son, I’mma have his ass beat a few times and make him straight”.
Viewers of his channel frequently leave miniature images, or “emotes”, containing antisemitic caricatures in the on-screen “chat” column.
A white supremacist and Holocaust denial
Ross, who is Jewish, has featured a number of guests with histories of making antisemitic comments, including American Nick Fuentes, who has been described as a white supremacist by the US Justice Department.
Fuentes this week started his own channel on Kick, telling his audience he had agreed with the site’s management to not include too much “political” content.
In his first stream, he used the N-word and played a clip which propagated a conspiracy theory about Jews.
Social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok block searches of Fuentes’ name, while X, formerly Twitter, allows him to have an account.
Another frequent guest on Ross’s Kick channel, “Sneako”, has a pattern of being banned from and rejoining live-streaming platforms.
A Herald and Age investigation published in May found a range of sexually inappropriate behaviour toward minors by Kick streamers, including Sneako, who met a pair of teenage girls online while streaming. When one said they were underage, he asked “how underage?”
Kick streamer Sneako has a pattern of being banned from and rejoining live-streaming platforms.
Sneako, who said “down with the yahud [Jews]” on another streaming site this year, signed up to Kick again this week. In his second stream, he called the slain leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, “an absolute hero”.
In his first stream, Sneako performed a Hitler salute while laughing and praising Kick as a platform where he could “believe what I believe”.
Sneako also expressed disbelief at the Holocaust’s death count and claimed Auschwitz was merely a “work camp” when he appeared on a stream with Ross this month. Ross rebutted Sneako’s points, at one point telling him “that’s literally not true”.
Andre Oboler, an antisemitism researcher and chief executive of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, said Kick was “a long way from what we expect in terms of basic online safety” on a social media platform.
Calling on Kick to immediately take down antisemitic and other hateful material, Oboler said the culture being promoted by some users was reminiscent of the notorious image board site 4chan.
“That is a culture which is deeply antisemitic and promotes harm to create entertainment for others,” he said.
“Kick needs to send a strong message that such content is not welcome on the platform.”
‘Our terms of service on hate speech are clear’
As a founder of Kick, Craven has invited a number of critics of the site onto his own channel to discuss content moderation.
US gaming journalist Rod Breslau told Craven this month that Kick had a reputation for allowing harmful material, and asked whether the company would draw the line at Holocaust denial.
Craven made clear his personal distaste for the content. But he said it wasn’t Kick’s role to hand Ross a suspension as he was only “allowing that conversation to take place on his channel”, rather than “inciting” it.
As Craven spoke, viewers left a number of blatantly antisemitic comments, including a four-letter slur against Jews.
“Encouraging or participating in bullying others under the guise of ‘just joking’ or ‘free-speech’ is counterproductive to the mission of Kick,” the company says in its community guidelines.
“Creators and chatters who engage in or promote hate-based speech through slurs or recognised hate-speech language will face enforcement action.”
In response to questions from the Herald, Kick said it had decided to ban the hook-nosed “emotes” and had deleted two antisemitic usernames for not complying with the site’s terms of service.
But the company did not answer most of the Herald’s detailed questions about individual streamers and comments, including whether the content would be allowed to remain online.
“Our terms of service on hate speech are clear, and we will remove content and take action against creators and users for breaches [sic] these terms,” the spokeswoman said in a written statement.
“The presence of a particular streamer on Kick does not mean we endorse their views, the same way publishing a letter to the editor or an op-ed should not be construed as endorsement by legacy media.”
The company said its AI tools scanned 485 million unique messages last month and that content moderation was “by definition, reactive”.
“This is a challenge for all platforms, including legacy media moderating comments online, and it’s even harder when you have more than 40 million users creating and interacting with content every day.”
Kick said “the vast majority” of the content enjoyed by its millions of users was not offensive.
Racist slurs used in the office, former staff allege
Two former employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said they frequently overheard discriminatory language when they worked at Kick’s Melbourne headquarters.
One said Kick employees treated streamers differently based on their sex or race, and that homophobic and racial slurs were common.
“Black creators [were] called the N-word with laughter usually ensuing, or silence,” they said.
“The women on the platform were many times called ‘whores’ and ‘thots’.”
A second former employee said they heard the N-word used as a slur “maybe 10 times a week” and that most members of their team had used it.
“The Kick team was very racist and immature,” the staffer said.
The claims follow allegations made by another former Kick employee in a video published in June, who said there was “a consistent disrespect to other people’s opinions and beliefs”.
“This went as far as consistently hearing the F-slur, and not only just in jest as a joke – it was specifically targeted towards people it was supposed to discriminate against.”
The former employee said she also heard staff use the N-word in a meeting where senior managers were present.
There is no suggestion Craven was part of the behaviour the former staff have described.
In a statement, a spokeswoman said: “We take a lot of pride in fostering an inclusive, diverse and positive workplace at Kick”.
Billionaire Edward Craven made his fortune through the online casino Stake.com before launching Kick. Credit: Eamon Gallagher
The spokeswoman said all claims of “insensitive” language had been investigated and only one was substantiated.
“In that one case, we took appropriate action to ensure that employees better understood expected standards of behaviour in our workplace,” she said.
Kick, which operates at a loss, has said it will one day become profitable through advertising, but that ads will not be rolled out any time soon.
Craven has repeatedly rejected suggestions that the reason he created Kick was to promote Stake.com by paying streamers to gamble live on the site. But he has acknowledged that Stake in the past has achieved a return on investment by paying streamers to gamble.
Gambling content is one of the most popular categories on Kick, and streamers such as Ross openly discuss contracts that require them to gamble.
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