CARDPOSTING. com
personal website of John David Card — writer, artist, historian, and anarchist organiser
Jason Thor Hall and Report Buttons
Jason Thor Hall is an online content creator, software developer, and self-described twenty-year veteran of the videogames industry. He has amassed millions of subscribers and billions of views livestreaming himself playing games, coding, and commentating on games industry topics through YouTube and Twitch under the handle 'PirateSoftware' - also the name of an independent games company he founded.
In the course of his online career, Hall has found himself at the middle of a number of controversies. His opinionated commentary and tendency to ever double-down has put him at odds with the opinion of the majority more than once - especially when concerning the topic of digital consumer rights. In particular, Hall's outspoken opposition to the '#StopKillingGames' consumer movement has earned him the ire of many online. Whether entirely warranted or not, this has been the impetus for many other creators, both small and large, to themselves publicly comment on Hall's extensive online presence and the weight he wields in the "online marketplace of ideas".
It is the opinion of this webpage (and its author) that vocally criticising Hall for his haughty online persona, or his public stance on #StopKillingGames, while perhaps well-intentioned, is not necessarily productive. However, this webpage would also assiduously argue that any given person does, or ought to, have the right to criticise Hall and his views - and, without needing to justify their criticisms' "productivity". In practice, this could reasonably mean using footage of Hall in a transformative and copyright-compliant context, or even using his image or likeness in a parodic or satirical manner fairly befitting Hall's position as a public figure of note.
Furthermore, on both YouTube and Twitch - where Jason Thor Hall, and all his most vocal critics can be found - there is a longstanding principle of 'Fair Use'. Whereby each platform balances respecting their obligations to uphold multi-national copyright law under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) with also facilitating a platform for creators to publicise transformative or parodic content of the sort articulated above. The right to make such content is upheld within both YouTube and Twitch's respective terms of service agreements, and expressly within the text of the DMCA itself too.
In short: any user of Twitch or YouTube has both the explicit legal right to satirise someone like Jason Thor Hall or to transformatively adapt his content - and, ostensibly, the guarantee of these websites' respective parent companies that they respect this right and will allow the exercise of it on their platforms. It is remarkable, and sincerely wonderful, that some of the largest corporations in the world do manage their creator-driven platforms in this fairly creator-friendly, common sense, way by promising to hew to the principle of Fair Use.
Of course, on websites used by literally billions of people daily - where, in practice, anyone can broadcast or upload theoretically anything, prohibited or not, - there does need to be some mechanism through which these websites' rules can be enforced. Broadly speaking, on both YouTube and Twitch, serious inter-personal threats, pornography, 'threats to national defence', and non-transformative content which does infringe on another party's copyright is all not allowed. Both websites attempt to prevent all these things from being on their platform through a combination of automated systems and relying on user-submitted reports.
It's a practical reality for sites of this size that no automated detection system can preemptively remove everything it ideally would. And ultimately, again, this webpage would argue, it is actually very consumer-friendly that any user can report serious rules-breaking (or law-breaking) content on YouTube or Twitch, and that any person or party has a means to formally report infringement of their intellectual property and request intervention as appropriate. Allowing user-reports is perhaps the best, most feasible, way for platforms like YouTube and Twitch to overcome the hurdle of moderating the literally hundreds of hours of content being created on their sites every minute.
There is, unfortunately, at least one significant downside to the existence of this user-report system however: it does potentially enable bad-faith actors to maliciously report perfectly 'legal' content (and/or, conspire with others to do so en masse). It should be noted, however, - that such malicious reporting, and the conspiring to do it, is actually itself prohibited by the terms of service of both YouTube and Twitch and can theoretically lead to the bad actor(s) having their access to either platform permanently terminated. Further still, under the DMCA, in many jurisdictions, maliciously and falsely making a formal complaint of copyright infringement - whether through a platform like YouTube, Twitch, or elsewhere - can not only open the perpetrator up to civil liability, but may be considered a criminal offense comparable to perjury.
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This webpage asserts that Jason Thor Hall has a long history of maliciously misusing reporting tools of the sort described above. That he does this to censor or intimidate anyone he perceives to be a critic of him or his actions - in blatant contravention of both the terms of service of the platforms he is active on, and the rights to produce transformative and parodic content enumerated by the DMCA. And that surely Hall has engaged in (and continues to engage in) this terms of service-violating, and potentially unlawful, behaviour so extensively that his removal from the platforms where this malicious false-reporting is happening would be entirely warranted.
Moreover, the webpage aims to do several things:
Collate and note instances where Jason Thor Hall and/or his employees or lackeys have targeted online creators, small and large, through false user-reports or copyright claims.
Encourage any other individuals targeted by Hall in this manner to come forth (ideally with something of evidentiary value) and add their experience to this ever-growing record of his actions.
And, perhaps most importantly, this webpage hopes to provide the ordinary YouTube or Twitch viewer who agrees Hall's actions are noxious and harmful a course of action they can take to help make his behavior known to those platforms' respective managements, in the hopes they will dispense with him fittingly.
Below will be a collection of instances where online creators have publicly made credible and substantiated claims that their critical coverage of Jason Thor Hall or Pirate Software has been erroneously removed following a user-report or a spurious copyright takedown claim made by Hall or on his behalf. And, this page will continue to update regularly, as frequently as necessary, should many more instances of Hall's misuse of online reporting systems come to light.
Underneath that will be instructions on how any user can report a YouTube or Twitch page legitimately for violation of their respective terms of service agreements, such as the extensive misuse of their reporting or copyright claims tools.
At the very bottom of this webpage will be its author's contact details, should you want to share another instance of Hall inappropriately using online reporting tools you would like to see added here.
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Jason Thor Hall has been getting content critical of him censored or taken down under false pretenses since at least early-2024. By this time, Hall had established himself as a relatively large streamer, and had also attempted to preemptively remove from the internet any and all references to his earliest online activities - producing furry-themed content in the MMO Second Life under the screen-name 'Maldavius Figtree'.
His efforts to do this by removing any reference to this part of his career from his own online pages and from furry-run Second Life player wikis were legitimate. Hall's subsequent efforts to direct his online fans to falsely report other content creators who referenced his time as 'Maldavius Figtree' were not.
As early as April that same year, it appears Hall and/or his associates were monitoring YouTube, Twitch, and other online platforms for any mention of him, his studio Pirate Software, or his early Maldavius Figtree persona. And, seemingly every video Hall could find which was critical of him was targeted for mass user-reporting by members of his audience on false terms of service-violation or copyright related grounds. Hall's large audience and millions-strong subscribership enabled him to do this; he has enough fans he can readily mobilise a large amount of people to report content he doesn't like through his livestreams (or else, through social platforms like Discord), and his status and reputation as a large content creator gives him a outsized amount of influence with, and access to, the middle-management of a website like YouTube.
This systemic reporting largely worked and got content from many people - some of whom were modestly-sized but established creators, and some of whom were anonymous hobbyists with negligible prior audience - wrongly removed. Furthermore, this behaviour from Jason Thor Hall seemed to remain unnoticed by most through 2024.
Obviously, it would be incredibly difficult for a very small creator to publicise the fact they're being actively suppressed or censored by someone, because of that censorship itself.
It is also very difficult for any third party to begin collating instances of other small creators being censored - again, because of the very nature of the problem.
Also, it must be noted, that Jason Thor Hall was a relatively well-respected and trusted online figure until around mid-2025 - when his outspoken opposition and antagonism towards consumer initiatives like #StopKillingGames finally saw a sizable amount of public opinion turn away from him. And therefore, no-one necessarily had any reason to go searching for unknown creators asserting and demonstrating that Hall was suppressing them.
This is how Hall has gotten away with this behaviour for some long without consequence; his misuse of reporting tools was so extensive hitherto it even effectively stopped people pointing out it was happening, wrongful censorship is inherently difficult to demonstrate the presence of, and nobody had real cause to suspect he would do something like this until recently.
Those issues acknowledged and now hopefully overcome - again, this webpage hopes to collate as many credible or reasonably substantiated claims from online creators that they have been maliciously targeted by Jason Thor Hall in this manner as possible.
Directly below are some of these claims.
As previously alluded to, engaging in this behaviour of false-reporting other creators is something that can get a person or their channel removed permanently from both YouTube and Twitch. Again, this webpage would argue that Jason Thor Hall has surely crossed whatever threshold there is which determines whether or not someone ought to be removed from YouTube and/or Twitch for the sake of protecting other users from him. If you agree, you can report Jason Thor Hall on both YouTube and Twitch for his actions yourself.
On YouTube, any channel can reported directly from its channel page. Simply navigate to the button labeled 'Report user' in the channels description, and click it. One of the options available in the subsequent pop-up menu that asks why you are reporting this user will be "Harassment and cyberbullying".
This webpage would argue that this is the most apt way to describe Hall's extensive history of maliciously using YouTube's reporting tools to silence his critics, and that Hall should be legitimately reported to YouTube for his actions.
Jason Thor Hall's false-reporting across his multiple online platforms is also in contravention of Twitch's terms of service.
There is a process for reporting "Off-Twitch behavior" that can similarly be followed by navigating to the 'Report Channel' button on any Twitch streamer's channel page. This will involve sending an email to Twitch's 'Off-Service Investigation Team', but they can be sent a report detailing Hall's extensive misuse of DMCA reporting tools by any person.
Frankly, the likelihood that Jason Thor Hall is appropriately deplatformed from the sites he uses based off of a modest amounts of reports alone is not necessarily high. However, there is a real possibility that beginning to collate and note instances of Hall's misuse of his platforms' reporting tools like this could lead to him facing some amount of consequence, especially if his actions became significantly more widely known. And Hall's actions can only become more widly known if someone dutifully keeps track of, and publicises, them.
Furthermore, in the view of this webpage's author - failing to take any sort of action in the face of such appalling behaviour from a large and established online figure, no matter how seemingly slim the chances are of affecting immediate change, would feel tantamount to ignoring or tolerating that behaviour.
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This webpage is not intended to be a catalogue or a list of everything objectionable or problematic Jason Thor Hall and his associates have ever done. For one thing, such a list would be unmanageablely long and far too unfocused. Instead, it hopes to be one very specific, pointed, critique of Jason Thor Hall - and offer one specific solution.
The list of credible or substantiated claims made by other creators that Hall has specifically targeted them through the use of false and malicious user-reports and copyright takedown notices kept here will be updated as necessary - but this webpage is not intended to be a repository of simply everything bad Jason Thor Hall, his hangers-on, and his company has ever done.
If you are an online creator who has yourself been targeted by Hall in this manner, or you know of another instance of Hall targeting someone else, the author of this webpage humbly request you send an email containing all the pertinent details to CardpostingComments@gmail.com
If you are an online creator interested in reporting on Jason Thor Hall's evident history of making false user-reports and false copyright takedown notices to silence or intimate his detractors, feel completely free to use all the information provided here however you wish.
last updated: July 28th, 2025
