For the past year, the Twitch Terms of Service was amended to be much more strict in order to protect against hate speech, harassment, and other forms of malicious behavior we may see on the internet. However, has the Twitch Terms of Service (TOS) agreement gone too far and silenced our individual voices by steering our language? Or has it helped protect us against bullies and the spread of racist and misogynistic movements?
A few days ago, I watched a fellow streamer get drunk and start slut-shaming his recent ex girlfriend who is also a streamer on Twitch. It was a jarring experience for many reasons.
First of all, there is very little barring people from doing this, since they can delete their video of the day while they are streaming in order to evade a ban. Technically, talking ill of another streamer is against the TOS, but this guy managed to flame the living hell out of this girl, attracting more viewers to his stream, generating more revenue, and hurting her reputation in the process. After this stream, he simply deleted his video and did not get banned.
A few days ago, I also put up with some severe harassment in my stream when a group of trolls started coming in making sexist, slut-shaming, racist, body-shaming usernames in order to spam my stream notifications across my screen. It was highly disruptive towards my stream because I had to stop my stream, change settings in my Streamlabs program, and then restart the stream in order to turn off host and follower notifications. Not only was I getting harassed, but supposedly I could get banned for people making usernames that violated the TOS because bad words were flashing across my screen whether or not I had control over the situation.
How is this fair? I’m the one getting harassed, yet I’m the one that could get banned.
Last week, I wrote a little bit about the Twitch TOS and how all of my guildmates except me got banned recently due to a raid leader saying a racist phrase in a fit of rage. Even though my guildmates didn’t say anything that violated the TOS, the words still got broadcast on their stream, so their channels got chain-suspended that night.
I cant help but find this frustrating. For an entire year, I have had to be extremely careful with everything that goes onto my stream. So much so that I feel like my individuality gets suppressed because I have to be so careful about not only what I say, but what other people say on my stream. If someone says something wrong, I have to disrupt my stream, kill my viewership, and delete the video of the day in order to avoid getting banned.
I really wonder how harassment will ever get handled on Twitch. As a female who is competitive at a game, I get more hate than the average female streamer because I am a threat. Sexism and harassment gets a lot worse the higher up you go in a competitive atmosphere and it’s no wonder why the population of female gamers in Esports is basically zero. What do you guys think we could do to prevent users from using VPN’s, creating alternate accounts, and spamming people’s streams with horrible words? Trolls don’t just say bad things in chat now, since they can get easily banned from channels. Now, they make usernames made up of bigoted, hateful words and follow streams in order to get attention and possibly get streamers banned. Please comment with your thoughts on this issue. What do you think Twitch can do to amend this predicament? Are their TOS actually helping or hindering us?
VITAMINPEE 