Twitch's Community Guidelines regarding Sexual Conduct in 2023
These aspects of the guidelines seem incongruent with the interests of a younger audience, potentially exposing them to content that may not be suitable for their age group.
Examples of their recent changes to their guidelines permit what they call "artistic nudity", poledancing, and twerking. On top of this, the guidelines effectively state that there is no age restriction (i.e. 18+).
I find this blatant disregard for child safety on the internet incredibly disturbing, and given Twitch has had controversies in the past regarding sexual misconduct, they choose to update their guidelines to include it instead of taking action against these violations in favour of the financial benefits that these offending users provide the platform.
I created an account with the age set to 15 and I was not only able to see the thumbnails of these 18+ streams, but a lot of these streams I was able to view the streams of.
Additionally, given that this is a site advertised towards ages 14+ and that it has a large presence on the general internet, it should not be aligning itself with these guidelines regardless of if you're underage or not. It's basically a 18+ cam site advertising to children.
Twitch should either be providing an 18+ age requirement for its entire platform and labelling itself as an adult site (and subsequently have the same reach appropriate for an adult site), or make its platform age-appropriate for the ages it's advertising towards (14+).
I recommend the latter due to the users/streamers that have built a community around the guidelines this platform used to stand for. Either way, something needs to change.
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SapphireDrew commented
Twitch and Amazon have sent a clear message with these policies that they have absolutely no problem promoting and encouraging what can be seen by even the most oblivious person as blatant sex work, their streams almost always through a pinned post, profile, or bot link to an OnlyFans or other hardcore / 18+ site. This is NOT okay when you have MINORS IN YOUR USERBASE AND ALLOW ANYONE 13+ TO BE ON HERE! I know Twitch needs money to operate, but degenerating into a softcore adult cam site clone is NOT the answer!
As per your sexual content policy page, "In addition, the former Sexually Suggestive Content policy was out of line with industry standards and resulted in female-presenting streamers being disproportionately penalized."
What industry standards?! The sex work industry? You sure as heck can't be referring to the gaming or art industry when you have an entire category dedicated to people, primarily women, trying to show as much skin as possible while making overtly sexual gestures or writing people's names on their ****** in exchange for throwing bits and subs at them. For God's sake, this is not and should never be allowed to become another "Chaturbate". These streamers know **** well what they're exploiting on a site intended for anyone 13+! For God's sake, my niece browses this site! This has absolutely nothing to do with being fair to female presenting streamers and everything to do with trying to profit off of sex work while pretending that it's not! Anyone with even half a brain knows that's what it is given the recent trend of streamers being literally naked on camera and just pointing the cam barely above the point of no return, all while linking to their linktree which links to their OnlyFans or other adult sex work sites.
It's sad to see Twitch has become either this desperate for revenue and / or this morally bankrupt just for a quick buck. This type of "content" has no absolutely no place nor purpose on a site that was originally designed for the gaming and creative communities.
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kizna_nd commented
Twitch already removed "artistic nudity" however I feel like more moderating needs to be done, strip teases, pole dancing, TWERKING? really??
Twitch, I know you can fix this, you've already fixed the "artistic nudity" part however there are still inappropriate matters that still need to be addressed.
Please continue to moderate and update your tos, there are people that are calling the removal of "artistic nudity" as an L. L for Loss, as if something that was so good was taken away from them, that behavior is also inappropriate, theres two people that are spam copy pasting the same thing over the UserVoice 'forums' being derogatory about how people saying "think about the kids" isn't about the kids but the person thats reporting it, this is false. Most likely the person thats copypasting that is a minor themself and is trying to abuse the system to get you (twitch) to bring back this cursed tos (previous, the one that started this whole mess) to return back, please do not let them gaslight you. Thank you.
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derfritz92 commented
imagine a world where people are more afraid of Gun violence then ***** on the internet.
but hey thanks..they backed down for nothing...just old moral standards