As expected, Twitch has modified its new 'politics and sensitive social issues' rules, and nobody is happy with the changes
Less than a week after rolling out a new rule requiring streams covering "politics and sensitive social issues" to carry a content classification label, Twitch has modified the policy to exempt streamers talking about their «lived experience.»
«We have made some updates to our policy language to better clarify what needs a „Politics and Sensitive Social Issues“ Content Classification Label (CCL),» Twitch wrote on X. «We want to make clear that you don’t need to label your stream if you’re talking about your lived experience. We’ve made this clearer in our CCL guidelines, which are linked below. We’ve also clarified that a label is only required if discussion of the listed topics is the focus of the stream.
»Our goal here, as with any CCL, is to give viewers and brands more info about what’s happening on a particular stream, so that they can make an informed decision about what to watch and where to engage."
The original policy on sensitive content was implemented after a month of escalating back-and-forth claims of Islamophobia and antisemitism on the platform, which resulted in a two-week ban of Zack «Asmongold» Hoyt over a racist tirade against Palestinians, as well as several Arab streamers who took part in a TwitchCon panel in which they ranked other streamers on a scale of «Arab» to «loves Sabra.»
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said at the time that «there is no place on Twitch for racism, hatred, or harassment of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia,» but the new rules raised the ire of LGBTQ+ streamers angry that the simple fact of their existence was suddenly considered «political.» There were also concerns that they could suffer revenue losses as advertisers can, and often do, avoid streams with content warning labels, regardless of why they're applied.
The updated rules are aimed at addressing those concerns. Two of the examples cited as sensitive content in the original guidelines, «discussing ideological or socio-political views on topics like
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