Former Kick employee says the company had a "hostile" working environment with racial and homophobic slurs freely used in office

A former Kick employee who goes by the online alias ItsMelissaDude uploaded a video on her YouTube on June 17, 2024, alleging numerous instances of a "hostile" working environment at the company behind the scenes. She also claimed racial and homophobic slurs were allegedly used frequently by various people in the office, and that the moderators weren't doing enough to protect the children on the platform.

In the video titled Ex-Staff - "Why I HAD to leave KICK", ItsMelissaDude stated that people were unhelpful about her problems and were disrespectful of other people's beliefs:

"The office environment for me was extremely hostile. Not only because I was being treated pretty poorly by a couple of individuals and the people that I went to for help were not helpful at all, but because there was just a consistent disrespect to other people's opinions and beliefs."

She then accused office workers of using the homophobic f-word and the racial n-word slurs in the presence of upper management, insinuating a toxic work culture in the whole company:

"And this one as far as to consistently hearing the f-slur. Not even just in jest, like it was a joke. It was specifically targeted towards people it is supposed to discriminate against. Even so much as to walk past the socials room, the guys that run the Kick streaming and Kick community, and hear the N-word just dropped, hard-r. And they had the upper management in the room!"

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"They don't care about pedophiles": Former Kick staffer claims the streaming platform is not protecting children

On top of bringing allegations that the work environment was toxic with people using offensive slurs, ItsMelissaDude went on to talk about much more serious topics in her video. The former employee claimed the platform was not doing enough to help protect the children who use the website.

Claiming that she had to fight for a supposed pedophile to get removed from Kick, she stated:

"They don't care about pedophiles on the platform, like this guy right here. I had to fight tooth and nail to get this off."

Later on in the video, she also called out a permanent staff member who promoted an 11-year-old streamer on social media. This is in strict contrast to the terms of service laid out on Kick's official website, stating that children below 13 years of age may not use the platform or its services.

ItsMelissaDude pulled up a screenshot of a post on X by Santamaria and said she had previously banned the child from Kick due to the rules, but that his account had been reinstated:

"I saw this tweet about two or three weeks ago where a permanent staff member is promoting on Twitter an 11-year-old boy. Last I was there, I was the reason this kid god banned and I am sorry to the child, that might upset you. But it's about your own safety."

She went on to explain why the child should be taken off the platform:

"Especially on Kick, sometimes I feel like you should not be under 18. This child was banned when I was there because I had zero tolerance towards it because children need to be protected. Not only against the people on the platform, but you need to protect children from being exploited by their parents, which you see on YouTube all the time."

ItsMelissaDude laid down some further reasoning for not having children as streamers:

"We need to protect children from people on the streams. If he got chat botted, or if a bad character came into his stream and said horrible things you can only imagine, I would feel guilty for that. And who knows what that's going to do the child as he grows up."

The former Kick employee also accused the moderators of not abiding by their own rules after providing further screenshots proving that the minor streamer is 11 years old:

"In the tweet he is just promoting it, the kid gets featured all the time and he is verified and he is 11. The reason I know he is 11 is because on his Facebook page that he used to stream on, he says I turned 11 in Dallas. They just blatantly ignore their terms of service."

Kick has yet to respond to the allegations and ItsMelissa's YouTube description for the video indicates that she might reveal other cases in the future. In related news, Trainwreckstv recently announced that the platform will soon get a new Twitch-like points-based award system.