The U.S. military has been recruiting teenagers from Twitch and running fake giveaways to disguise recruitment forms. This comes after an incident of the Army Esports Team on Twitch banning people for mentioning war crimes in chat. This is the most recent in a long history of video game-based recruitment tools used by the military to attract kids to the service. The Army even had the game series America’s Army back in the early 2000s which was a shooter based on real-world Army battles.
For decades the military has done whatever it can to reach young people where they before trying to convince them to join. Their two main pulls are service to the nation and that they will pay for one’s education or train them in useable skills. Using the draw of free school and a seemingly stable lifestyle, they have targeted the underprivileged and people in unstable situations.
An article by Jordan Uhl, someone involved in the Army Esports team banning wave, was published in The Nation today detailing exactly how the U.S. Military has been using Twitch as a recruiting tool to target minors as young as 13. Different branches of the military including the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all been streaming on Twitch for the last few months, acting as if they are Twitch Channels like any other. These soldiers, sailors, and airmen almost all in the 30s have been talking like young teens saying things like “It do be like that sometimes” and “We do have some great comms,” while doing everything they can to endear themselves to their viewers. It’s true that’s what every Twitch channel does, but other Twitch channels don’t want viewers to go to war and other Twitch channels don’t have links to disguised recruitment tools.
The Army’s Esports chat sends automated prompts about a giveaway for an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, but when viewers click on those links, they are sent to a recruitment form where controllers are never mentioned again. The Navy’s Twitch bio says, “Other people will tell you not to stay up all night staring at a screen. We’ll pay you to do it. Get a look at what life is like inside the uniform on the America’s Navy,” implying to their viewers that they too can join and just play video games on Twitch despite the fact that all members of the Navy’s Esports team are at least petty officer third class which will take someone at least a few years to get to.
The United States has a volunteer military and they do need people to fill uniforms, but they should not be filling those uniforms by misleading children through giveaways or tempting teens with jobs that don’t exist. The Navy’s Esports team is 10 people out of 325,000. America has the largest military on Earth by expenditure and is in the top five for the amount of active-duty personnel.
