Twitch now requires a warning label for 'politics and sensitive social issues,' and it's going over exactly as well as you'd expect
Twitch has added a new category to its content classification guidelines covering «politics and sensitive social issues,» meaning that streams discussing topics such as «elections, civic integrity, war or military conflict, and civil rights» will need to labelled as such to ensure viewers don't accidentally stumble into them and be exposed to content they might find offensive.
Content classification labels are required for streams that don't violate Twitch's community guidelines but contain material that might not be «appropriate for everyone, including younger viewers.» In the past, that's included things like M-rated games, sexual themes, drug use, violence, and gambling. Now added to that list is a new, vaguely-defined category encompassing «discussions and debates about political or sensitive social issues.»
The new content category comes in the wake of an ugly month for Twitch. Popular streamer Zack «Asmongold» Hoyt was suspended for two weeks following a racist tirade in which he described Palestinians as «terrible people» who come from «an inferior culture.» (He's back now, by the way.) A week later, Twitch banned several Arab streamers over a month-old TwitchCon panel in which they ranked other streamers on an «Arab» to «loves Sabra» scale, Sabra being a brand of hummus owned by Israeli-American partnership.
At around the same time, it came to light that Twitch had quietly stopped taking email-verified signups from Israel and Palestine more than a year prior. Twitch quickly apologized for the «unacceptable miss and the confusion it has caused,» saying it initially disabled signups with email verification in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 «to prevent uploads of graphic material,» and somehow forgot to switch them back on.
The events put Twitch's policies under the microscope, as the platform was accused by various parties of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and/or gross negligence or straight-up incompetence.
Spurred by those
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