Twitch holds a difficult position within the modern media, as the largest live-streaming video service in the world. With this comes the responsibility of ensuring the safety of the millions of users that log into the website daily, regardless of how it may incite the users of the website.
Occasionally, the weight of this on Twitch renders certain decisions wildly unpopular, as users feel as though consequences are unevenly doled out across users and streamers depending on relation to staff. Other times, consequences are seemingly nowhere to be seen for streamers while users cry foul. Now, for the first time in almost a decade of service, Twitch is offering a few answers.
Twitch has released its first-ever transparency report, offering a fascinating view into how moderation is handled across the website. It does not outline policy on why moderation seems to be selective in enforcement more often than not. What Twitch focuses on instead is how the moderation efforts have been balanced across the entirety of Twitch, using statistics to show an increase in moderation that coincides with the increase of Twitch's popularity along with interesting parallels between Twitch and the US election cycle.
More than 31 million messages were manually removed from streams in the second half of 2020 versus the 15.8 million of the first half. This compares to 61.5 million "proactive" (meaning automod) removals in the first half of 2020, and 98.8 million proactive message deletions in the second half. This was before Twitch stated that certain words were against TOS, and bannable, which inevitably will cause the message deletion rate to exponentially increase.
One figure within the document shows that user reports of "terrorism, terrorist propaganda, and recruitment" saw an increase of over 200% between the two halves of 2020, coinciding with the United States election cycle, as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first-ever Twitch stream. Twitch views this figure as the most important category to track on the platform. It notes that it has had 77 enforcements against the "showing terrorist propaganda" and 10 enforcements against "glorifying or advocating acts of terrorism."
Interestingly, the shortest segment within the Twitch transparency statement is one that deals with explicit content on stream. After the controversy involving Forsen and MissBehavinOfficial which had users up in arms regarding ban lengths, a user would presume Twitch would take this opportunity to explain patterns of behavior. Forsen was banned for a month for being duped into showing arguably explicit content for less than a second, followed shortly by MissBehavinOfficial being banned for three days for streaming explicit content for over eighteen minutes to advertise her adult-services to her Twitch channel following.
Twitch has taken the first step in offering the oft-requested transparency. While it's not readily highlighting many of the Twitch controversies of 2020 that viewers have readily noted, it has shared more than otherwise necessary as a peace offering to the frustrated. Now users just need to see what the next step will be.
Source: Twitch.TV