New enhancements to our community guidelines
To our Twitch community,
Today, we’re sharing an update to our Community Guidelines. This is just the first of many improvements coming to the policies, moderation processes, and safety features on Twitch.
We use our Community Guidelines to keep the community strong and safe. These guidelines detail the content supported on Twitch, rules for streamers and viewers, and much more. Our goal is to ensure Twitch is a place where everyone feels welcome and we will continue to listen to you as we grow and adapt these policies as needed.
The story so far
Twitch began with a single core idea: stream video games online. That simple hook attracted viewers, but they stuck around because you, the streamers, built communities. You built a place viewers felt welcome, a place they could turn to for laughter, gameplay, or friendship. And, as you began to inject more of your personality and interests, you told us you wanted the freedom to create content when you weren’t gaming. So, last year, we loosened our restrictions on non-gaming content.
This let you bring as much of your life to Twitch as you wanted. It let you broaden your community or build new communities in areas like board gaming, talk shows, Creative, music, fitness, and IRL (to name just a few). By sharing yourself on Twitch, you let Twitch become part of your life, and we’re grateful for that privilege.
Over the past several months, you’ve told us certain sections of our Community Guidelines were not clear enough, or, in some cases, not strong enough to govern this ever-changing landscape. And we were too slow to act. To begin addressing this, we’re rolling out a series of updates to the policies, moderation processes, and products that guide interpersonal interaction on Twitch.
Today’s update focuses on our anti-harassment and sexual content policies. Our goal is to increase clarity, strength, and consistency across our entire moderation framework, as well as the frequency and level of detail of our moderation communications.
You helped us build Twitch — you ARE Twitch — and it’s our job to make you proud of the Twitch community.
Anti-harassment and hateful conduct policies
We want everyone to not only feel welcome on Twitch, but to be proud to be part of the community. To that end, we are strengthening our stance on harassment and hate.
First, conduct we deem to be hateful will result in an immediate indefinite suspension. Hate simply has no place in the Twitch community.
Additionally, we will now consider verifiable hateful or harassing conduct that takes place off-Twitch when making moderation decisions for actions that occur on Twitch. If you use other services to direct hate or harassment towards someone on Twitch, we will consider it a violation of Twitch’s policies.
We are also updating our moderation framework to pay close attention to the context and intent in addition to the words or actions used. Please remember, even if you’re just joking with your friends, you’re still choosing to stream on a service that reaches a large audience.
Sexual content
Twitch is an open global community with users of many ages and cultures. Because of this, it’s important that your content is not sexual in nature. We’re updating our moderation framework to review your conduct in its entirety when evaluating if the intent is to be sexually suggestive. We’ll be looking at contextual elements such as the stream title, camera angles, emotes, panels, attire, overlays, and chat moderation. Offering access to prohibited sexual content such as “lewds” on Twitch remains prohibited.
Attire in gaming streams, most at-home streams, and all profile/channel imagery should be appropriate for a public street, mall, or restaurant. As a reminder, we will not tolerate using this policy as a basis to harass streamers on or off Twitch, regardless of whether you think they’re breaking this rule.
The transition period
The full changes are available in the revised Community Guidelines. You can read some examples and learn even more about how these changes may affect you in our corresponding help articles on anti-harassment and sexual content.
These new rules will go into effect on Monday, February 19th, 9:00 am Pacific Time. Until then, we’ll continue operating under the former Community Guidelines. You must remove Clips and VODs that violate the new guidelines before they go into effect.
During the transition period, we’ll be reaching out to some streamers whose current and past content may violate these new guidelines to help you be successful on Twitch. Our goal is to ensure everyone understands and adheres to the updated Community Guidelines so you can keep creating content for your communities.
A Better Twitch for Everyone
Guiding the community is an enormous responsibility and one we take to heart. Today’s updates are a major step forward and are just the beginning of our work. We’re committed to making you all feel welcome on Twitch and we will be increasing the frequency of communication, policy updates, and products to support this mission.
In the coming months, we will also be revisiting our enforcement policies for both partners and non-partners, our appeals process, IRL guidelines, and preventing user-to-user harassment. You can also expect significant improvements to AutoMod, Twitch’s automated chat moderation system.
Every day, tens of thousands of our streamers press the “Go Live” button and create amazing shared experiences for their communities. Whichever side of the screen you’re on, thank you for making Twitch the special place it is. We will continue doing our part to make Twitch even better.
Thank you,
Twitch
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