Twitch is beginning to enforce its updated Hateful Conduct and Harassment policy to protect all communities even when the misconduct occurs off the platform.
In case you missed it, the refreshed policy features a more straightforward and consistent stance against hate and harassment. This is something that we can easily appreciate in many scenarios inside the platform, something that the company’s AI can’t manage thanks to the fact that a lot of it happens outside of Twitch.
Twitch has released an article where they are shifting focus and talking about how they plan to address severe misconduct that impacts the community but happens off of the platform.
Twitch is updating and expanding its approach to off-service enforcement
Their current guidelines state that in some severe cases where there’s available and verifiable evidence, they’ll take action against the users for hateful conduct or harassment that happens off Twitch services. This means that something hateful or disrespectful happens on social media, other online services, or even offline, Twitch will take action.
The company is updating and expanding its approach to off-service enforcement, which now will wall into two categories. Here’s what you can expect (via their official blog):
Category one: Someone is harassed on Twitch, as well as off Twitch. When this happens, we will consider verifiable, off-service behaviors or statements that relate to an incident that took place on Twitch. For example: if we’re reviewing a harassment report about an incident that happened live on stream, related or continued harassment on Twitter could be taken into account when reported to us. This is how our current off-service policy works in the vast majority of cases and will not change.
Category two: We will now enforce against serious offenses that pose a substantial safety risk to the Twitch community, even if these actions occur entirely off Twitch. Examples of these behaviors include:
- Deadly violence and violent extremism
- Terrorist activities or recruiting
- Explicit and/or credible threats of mass violence (i.e., threats against a group of people, event, or location where people would gather).
- Leadership or membership in a known hate group
- Carrying out or acting as an accomplice to non-consensual sexual activities and/or sexual assault
- Sexual exploitation of children, such as child grooming and solicitation/distribution of underage sexual materials
- Actions that would directly and explicitly compromise the physical safety of the Twitch community, such as threatening violence at a Twitch event
- Explicit and/or credible threats against Twitch, including Twitch staff
How to report abuse
Additionally, Twitch has created a dedicated email address where anyone can report off-platform hateful misconduct, harassment, and any of the violations in the categories above. The email address is [email protected].
“Any info sent to this address will be treated as confidential, and only shared with a very limited group within Twitch and our third-party investigative partner,” Twitch says.
“It’s important to note that this is not intended to be a substitute for law enforcement or other safety processes, and we encourage reporting to the relevant legal authorities as the first step in these situations,” the company adds.
