The Shady Side Of Twitch

Over the last decade, Twitch has reshaped the landscape of competitive and social gaming. The platform introduced a new way for gamers to experience their favorite games and created some of the first real video game celebrities in the form of major streamers. For as dominant as the service is today, it rose from humble beginnings. In 2007, Justin Tan launched a live casting site called Justin.tv that mixed reality TV and live streaming. While viewers weren't immediately sold on the reality portion, the idea of livestreaming video captured a lot of attention.

In 2011, Justin.tv created a video gaming-specific channel called Twitch, which quickly became its most popular aspect. By 2014, the entire company had rebranded as Twitch. But despite its millions of fans, Twitch hasn't been free of controversy. While Twitch has done a lot to curtail negative aspects of the community, there have still been a few missteps. Here is the shady side of Twitch.

Twitch has reached a point where it is not only changing the landscape of the gaming community but also has begun to cross over into mainstream culture. When a medium becomes a good way to reach a new audience it attracts attention from sources its creators may not expect. This became controversial when recruiters from the US Army, Navy, and Air Force began using the platform to reach children as young as 13, the minimum age requirement for a Twitch account.

The US military using video games isn't new. The "America's" Army series launched in 2002 as a free game to recruit people for the Army. However, the military's approach to Twitch was subversive. In one instance, it asked asked viewers to register for information on joining the military in order to win an unspecified prize.

The military paused this practice after free speech advocates criticized the military's ability to ban viewers who made comments that cast the Army in a negative light. According to a report from the New York Times, lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that allowing government representatives to perform these bans was a violation of free speech and the First Amendment.

The nature of Twitch's user-generated content and dynamic community building has pushed the question of who is responsible for policing negative behavior on Twitch streams. Many users and streamers have argued Twitch itself should be working harder to eliminate harassers as the governing body of the service. However, given the influence that streamers and event organizers have over their communities, Twitch has sometimes tried to place more of that responsibility in the hands of whoever is running the stream.

Trying to eliminate every negative voice while running an entertaining stream is a difficult job. One streamer, Zombaekillz, described her struggle in an article for Tom's Hardware: She planned to run a scheduled stream of "Minecraft Dungeons" with her daughter, to be featured on Twitch's front page — an exciting opportunity for anyone on the platform. However, during the stream, she had to ban 54 users for sexist and racist comments.

Zombaekillz is far from alone. Female streamers have reported that their most significant obstacle to success on Twitch is harassment. While Twitch told NBC in 2019 it had doubled the staff dedicated to dealing with harassment, the issue remains.

Horrifying real-world violence has found its way onto Twitch live streams before, and has been met with universal denouncement by Twitch and the viewing public.

A minor "Fortnit"e streamer who went by MrDeadMoth, real name Luke Munday, was heard being physically and verbally abusive to his wife and family off-camera while streaming. Munday was charged with assault in Australia and banned from the Twitch. Munday briefly returned to Twitch about a month after the incident, only to receive another ban after an outcry from gamers worldwide.

A prominent "Call of Duty" streamer and member of the SoaR Gaming brand Carl Riemer fired a loaded gun by accident while streaming. A shocked Riemer destroyed his expensive monitor and frightened his pets out of the room before realizing what had happened. He was promptly banned from Twitch and removed from the SoaR roster.

Violent criminals have also tried to use the platform to glorify their unspeakable actions. A shooting at a synagogue in Germany, for example, was streamed live on Twitch.

One of the most significant issues both Twitch and streamers face is dealing with copyrighted material. Since 2014, Twitch has worked with Audible Magic to identify archives of Twitch streams and mute them if they contain unlicensed music. The decision was unpopular from the get-go, and its sudden implementation was followed by an apology from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear during a Reddit AMA. He went on to say that giving the community no notice was a mistake and to promise that live streams would never be subject to audio recognition.

While these reassurances may have temporarily calmed the community, problems with DMCA takedowns persist to this day. In June 2020, another round of DMCA takedowns started after Twitch was served with mass takedown requests for clips with music released between 2017 and 2019. The situation hit a new low in October when Twitch began deleting clips without giving streamers any warning or recourse to challenge the DMCA notifications that supposedly targeted them. Partnered streamers received emails about the deletions, along with vague warnings that they needed to delete content that violated the DMCA to avoid further repercussions.

The sudden deletions and threatening emails were only the beginning. As Twitch did not provide a method for identifying which videos were causing problems, several high profile streamers like Pokimane and Lirik braced themselves to delete the majority of their VODS — effectively erasing years of content and hard work. While Twitch eventually admitted that it had panicked and botched the whole affair, for many streamers the damage had already been done. The company promised creators better communication and support for detecting DMCA violations in a Nov. 11 blog post. The same day, Twitch encouraged streamers to turn off or mute in-game audio while streaming titles to avoid complications, which went over about as well as you would expect on a platform built around the concept of livestreaming video games.

A reality of Twitch is the pervasive nature of sexual harassment towards female streamers, viewers, and even employees of the company. These negative aspects of the platform are a sad reminder of inappropriate and unfair treatment that women often face in the gaming community.

In 2020, a tidal wave of sexual harassment allegations against prominent streamers on the platform occurred. As a result, Twitch made an official announcement that it had updated policies regarding sexual harassment and began banning streamers who had violated these policies. Later in the year, Twitch's accounts director of strategic partnerships, Hassan Bokhari, was terminated after being accused of sexual misconduct by a streamer named Vio. The streamer described the resolution as "bittersweet," considering the mountain of evidence she had to present to Twitch to get them to act on her information.

Vio isn't the only streamer who has been unhappy with the way Twitch has responded to severe instances of sexual harassment. Samantha Wong, who streams as Sampai, presented allegations of misconduct to Twitch's CEO, the head of Twitch HR, and the VP who managed the accused streamer's relationship with Twitch. It took more than a year for the company to respond.

Managing online security is one of the biggest challenges for any modern company. Companies like Twitch need to be cognizant of how they protect their data because leaving it undefended can hurt huge amounts of people. With millions of users, some of whom make their living streaming, Twitch had a big responsibility when it came to data.

In October 2021, the company confirmed via Twitter that someone had breached its servers. At the time, the company may have believed that the breach wasn't going to be all that serious, but when the data leaked out online, it quickly became clear that Twitch had been severely compromised.

The leak that followed the breach spilled plenty of company secrets. We learned that Amazon had planned to create a Steam alternative that never ended up seeing the light of day, and Twitch's entire source code suddenly became available to everyone online. The worst news for streamers was that the leak included Twitch's payout information going all the way back to 2019, revealing that roughly half of all the money earned on Twitch went to the top 10% of streamers. It also highlighted the extreme lack of diversity among the highest-earning streamers online.

In 2022, Bloomberg published an exclusive report on one of the most disturbing problems facing Twitch: a rash of child predators using Twitch to groom children. Twitch doesn't allow anyone under the age of 13 to make an account on the platform, but the barrier to entry is relatively low, so plenty of children have been making accounts and streaming from their phones. The report found nearly 2,000 different Twitch accounts that primarily followed accounts from children who were young teens or otherwise under the official Twitch age limit.

Finding accounts that watched kids would have been bad enough, but Bloomberg also encountered many instances of these accounts interacting with the children they were watching. Some would ask them to do suggestive dances, and others would attempt to get the kids to move to a more private platform like Snapchat or Discord to keep talking. The report also pointed out that while child predators are a problem everywhere online, they seem to have an outsized presence on Twitch.

After the report, Twitch made an announcement introducing some changes aimed at addressing these concerns. The company beefed up age verification processes in an attempt to reduce the number of kids under 13 using the platform, as well as blocked certain search terms that are frequently used by predatory accounts. Twitch also partnered with outside organizations for assistance and acquired Spirit AI to enhance its ability to monitor chat conversations. Those are all welcome changes, but the problem is far from solved.

Twitch hit a breaking point with gambling streams in 2022. For years, the platform had allowed people to stream themselves playing just about any gambling game they wanted. Because of this, some streamers who played slots, roulette, and poker had huge amounts of viewers turn up to watch them win or (perhaps more frequently) lose money.

It's no secret that gambling can be addictive, and that addiction can make people do some awful things. In September 2022, Twitch streamer Sliker admitted that he'd scammed thousands of dollars out of viewers to support his own gambling habit. People had already been speaking out against the prevalence of gambling on Twitch, but after this incident, streamers started making their own stances on gambling crystal clear.

Fans joined in the effort and began petitioning Twitch to completely remove gambling from the platform, arguing that it was harming viewers, particularly young ones, and roping more people into addictive behavior. The company eventually responded, updating its Community Guidelines to ban streaming of any "sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games and aren't licensed either in the U.S. or in other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection." 

Of course, that still leaves some wiggle room for gambling to exist on Twitch. Streamers and fans had been arguing that any form of gambling is damaging to the platform, so in all the ways that matter, Twitch still has a gambling problem.

In recent years, Twitch has made a number of unpopular decisions with the stated goal of increasing the platform's profitability. Ending 70/30 splits was one deeply controversial way that the company tried to boost its revenue. That move might have inspired some of Twitch's top executives to look for new work, and it certainly caused some streamers to start eyeballing the competition. What's even more upsetting for Twitch is that these recent decisions apparently haven't worked all that well.

New Twitch CEO Dan Clancy released a blog post on March 20, 2023, which brought some disappointing news about the company. Clancy revealed that Twitch was going to be laying a huge part of its workforce. He said that 400 employees would be let go, but the reasons behind the layoffs were vague. "Our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment," Clancy wrote, "and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations."

Bloomberg reported that the layoffs primarily affected Twitch's moderation team and a recently formed AI ethics team. Considering the desperate need Twitch has for more moderation, those cutbacks are deeply concerning. And as AI becomes a more prevalent tool of online platforms, maintaining a dedicated ethics team seems like a reasonable ask. For now, Twitch will be going with less of each — and streamers and fans will have to judge what happens next for themselves.

While the entire streaming community was railing against Twitch for trying to cut into the ad revenue of its streamers, the company quietly made another pivotal change to its Terms of Service. Simulcasting is an important capability for streamers who aren't locked into a platform-specific contract. It lets them share their stream on multiple platforms at the same time, meeting their audience wherever they may be at. Simulcasting doesn't just help streamers grow their audience, it also helps connect viewers on different platforms and encourages them to potentially take a look at a site they may not regularly visit.

That's no longer an option for anyone who wants to stream on Twitch. When Twitch updated its policies on June 6, 2023, it also killed simulcasting for all its users, restricting them to only sharing their Twitch streams in short formats on sites like TikTok and Instagram. Previously that rule had only applied to Twitch Partners and Affiliates. 

Streamers were quick to share their opinions. Ninja said that Twitch's latest move "only hurts their platform and the creators on their site." While reacting to Ninja's take on the issue, xQc explained to his channel that, in his view, Twitch is trying to lock in streamers and viewers alike by restricting them to a single platform. xQc said he thinks this strategy is bound to fail. 

"They force you to choose and [Twitch users] will dwindle down slowly until it completely flips. And when that flips it's impossible to go back," xQc argued. This likely contributed to xQc's decision to jump ship shortly thereafter.