One of the biggest streaming sites in the world announced Friday it is “rolling back” a controversial update that left many users questioning the future of the site.
Twitch, which touted 1.3 trillion minutes watched and over 35 million average daily visitors in 2022, is a massive force in the content creation world.
There are literally people who make a very comfortable living (six-figure salaries) streaming on the ubiquitous platform, doing little more than playing video games for viewers.
As the site grew following its founding in the late aughts, the platform grew in popularity — and variety.
The platform, which is currently owned by Amazon and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos after changing ownership several times over the course of its history, soon began to incorporate non-video game content, as well.
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That included things such as music performances (deejaying became particularly prominent on Twitch during the pandemic lockdowns), art demonstrations (think Bob Ross) and just general human interaction (the “just chatting” content has exploded in popularity over the years).
Of course, as is often the case with the internet, video games and any other medium whose primary demographic is made up of swathes of young men, Twitch swiftly became a platform for attractive women to ply their “trade” — no matter how risqué that trade may be.
The proliferation of attractive women (some who seem to genuinely love video games, and others who are clearly preying on the stereotypical “incel” gamers) streaming on Twitch created a stiff competition among those streamers, and that, in turn, led to the boundaries being pushed for the sake of remaining relevant in an increasingly competitive space.
It ultimately led to where you think it would: Prominent female Twitch content creators increasingly sexualized their content. Things appeared to come to a head when some streamers began gaining fame for literally being topless during streams — the camera would just happen to cut off without any actual nudity being shown.
Have you ever heard of Twitch before?
On Wednesday, in perhaps an attempt to capitalize on this sort of lurid content, Twitch announced that it was updating its terms of service to allow some of this aggressively sexualized content (which was previously prohibited) to be fair game for streaming.
Here’s just a sampling of what was previously banned, but now allowed:
WARNING: The following descriptions contain graphic descriptions that the reader may find disturbing
- Content that “deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region.”
- Fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks, regardless of gender.
- Body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks, regardless of gender.
But perhaps the most alarming update to Twitch’s terms of service: “Erotic dances that involve disrobing or disrobing gestures, such as strip teases,” were now allowed.
A quick search on social media for “Twitch” shortly after this update came out yielded countless users lamenting that the platform was on the fast track to becoming a literal pornographic site.
(Twitch does feature the same “restrictions” as a porn site would on more mature content, though they are the type of restrictions that a 13-year-old who knows how to click on “yes” with a mouse cursor can bypass.)
The floodgates had been opened on Twitch, and the deeply sexualized content appeared here to stay.
Until it wasn’t.
On Friday, just two days after first issuing this missive, Twitch backtracked on this policy change and admitted that bad-faith actors had already abused the change.
“First, we want to make clear that some streamers, in response to this update, created content that was in violation of our new policy,” Twitch noted in a Friday update. “We’ve worked quickly to remove that content and issue channel enforcements.”
The streaming platform added: “So, effective today, we are rolling back the artistic nudity changes. Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium.”
(The only exception to this update to the update appears to be nudity in Mature-rated video games.)
