Twitch uses Community Guidelines, rules for streamers and viewers, to the keep the community strong and safe. With the goal to ensure that Twitch is a place that everyone feels welcome and that Twitch continues to grow, Twitch has introduced a whole new set of improvements to their Community Guidelines.
Twitch began with a single core idea: stream video games online. As the Twitch community grew, and the demand for creating content outside of gaming increased, Twitch decided in 2017 to loosen their restrictions by building new communities like board gaming, talk shows, creative, music, fitness and IRL. But over the past several months, the community has struggled with certain sections of the guidelines in terms of clarity and its strength. To address this issue, Twitch is rolling out a series of updates to the policies, moderation process and products that guide interpersonal interaction on Twitch. The first of these updates focuses on anti-harassment, hateful conduct policies, and sexual content policies. Here are the details–
Anti-harassment and hateful conduct policies
There is no place for hate in the Twitch Community. Hence, conduct deemed to be hateful in the eyes of Twitch will result in an immediate indefinite suspension. Twitch will also consider verifiable hate or harassing conduct that takes place off-Twitch when making moderation decisions for actions that occur on Twitch. Simply put, if someone uses other services to direct hate or harassment towards someone on Twitch, they will consider it a violation of Twitch policies. Furthermore, the Twitch’s moderation framework will pay close attention to the context and intent in addition to words or actions used.
Sexual Content
Twitch’s global community consists of users of many ages and culture and so it is important for them that Streamers’ content is not sexual in nature. Twitch’s new moderation framework will now review your conduct in its entirety when evaluating if the intent is sexually suggestive or not, by looking into elements such as the stream title, camera angles, emotes, panels, attire, overlays and chat moderation. Attire in particular in gaming streams, most at-home streams and in all profile/channel imagery should be appropriate for a public street, mall or restaurant. And as always, offering access to prohibited sexual content such as “lewds” remains prohibited on Twitch.
These new rules in the community guidelines will take effect on 19 February 2018 at 9:00 AM PT/ 10:30 PM IST. Until then, make sure you remove Clips and VODs that violate the new guidelines. Twitch will also be reaching out to some streamers whose current and past content may violate these new guidelines to help them be more successful on Twitch.
In the coming months, Twitch will also be revisiting their enforcement policies for both partners and non-partners, their appeals process, IRL guidelines, and preventing user-to-user harassment. We can also expect significant improvements to Twitch’s AutoMod.
Click here to learn even more about the community guideline changes.
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