Twitch unbans shaking butts and twerking for animated emotes

polygon.com:

Finally, all those little dumpy Crewmates from Among Us can start shaking their asses on Twitch again. CEO Dan Clancy announced changes to the platform’s Community Guidelines on Wednesday, allowing cute animated emotes where characters shake their butts and twerk will be allowed on the platform.

Emotes help cultivate lively and active viewers in Twitch. Oftentimes, spamming emotes and using channel-specific icons in the chat can be just as fun as consuming the content itself. Now, the team is changing the emote content rules so that they’re in line with the general Community Guidelines. This means: time to twerk.

“So in particular emotes that feature shaking butts — commonly referred to as twerking but we’ll just call them shaking butts — are now permitted under our guidelines,” Clancy said on Patch Notes livestream on Wednesday.

The banned emotes were never particularly graphic to begin with and impacted a lot of simple cartoon drawings. Twitch users reported strict moderation in response to the emotes in the summer on 2021. But now, those restrictions won’t apply. Polygon reached out to Twitch to ask about the change and a representative of the company replied with the following statement:

We set out to clarify how emotes are evaluated for approval by our teams. Before today, the guidelines we used to evaluate emote requests differed from our Community Guidelines, in some ways. We realize that this may have caused confusion, as it wasn’t always clear how we made approval decisions. Now, we’ve brought our emote guidelines more in line with the rest of our Community Guidelines. We think this step will help to clarify our decision-making process for the community, something that’s important to us.

Twitch users have already embraced the change with open cheeks. Popular memes — like a GIF where a Crewmate from Among Usshakes and bounces its butt — will be able to make a return to Twitch chat. The ass-shaking has long been a popular format for emotes in general so