Twitch: New Guidelines Amidst #ADayOffTwitch Movement
Twitch has been through a lot recently. Twitch’s fortunes have fallen after a slew of high-profile streamers moved to YouTube Gaming. Furthermore, given the platform’s constant hate raids and other concerns, streamers see no other option but to explore for alternatives.
However, it appears that the Amazon-owned platform is taking streamer issues into account, as it recently announced a new set of restrictions.
Twitch streamers will now have more control over viewership and access to their Twitch channels and Twitch chats as a result of this change. Streamers can now choose for email or phone verification for chat participants, according to the updated criteria. They can either need all of their viewers to verify their email addresses or phone numbers, or they can require only a subset of their viewers to do so.
Streamers can choose to exempt their subscribers and VIP members from verification if they like. The move was made to ensure streamer safety on Twitch, which has recently become a hot topic.
Twitch users couldn’t help but draw parallels between the #ADayOffTwitch protest and this new function when it was announced. When the campaign started, it went viral, with popular streamers refusing to stream on their channels for a day. This was done in support of all the streamers who had been targeted by hate-speech attacks on their channels. Members of the LGBTQIA community and people of color are frequently among the streamers.
The movement caused chaos on the platform, as its viewership was severely impacted. Furthermore, the trend could not have come at a worse moment for Twitch, since many major streamers were also making the switch from Twitch to YouTube at the time.
These factors forced Twitch to take prompt action against these hate-raids, albeit those attempts seemed rather feeble to people.
After the Twitch community voiced its displeasure with the approach, the platform announced a plan to address the issues of hate raids and abusive chat comments. Twitch stated while presenting these plans that the measures were only temporary while the team worked on more specific strategies to address the concerns.
The new authentication procedure appears to be one of Twitch’s tangible measures aimed at putting an end to hate raids on the platform. While some members of the community appear to be pleased with this innovation, others appear to be suspicious.
One Twitter user, for example, pointed out that the email verification approach was ineffective because Twitch did not have a single account per email policy. As a result, trolls can easily establish a new account and return to it if their current one is banned.
Similar concerns have been expressed concerning Twitch’s phone verification system.
These are all genuine concerns, and the platform should recognise and respond to them in order to put the community’s fears about hate- raids attacks to rest. While this is far from a foolproof approach of combating issues such as hate-raids, it is a start.