There's nothing to "clarify", because it shouldn't be there in the first place.

Anything short of completely excising the points is unacceptable.

The updates to this section are a half measure and won't stop bad actors from abusing it to limit the visibility of streamers discussing gender or race in any capacity.

The clarification does little to nothing. The wording is still incredibly vague and will still be used by bad actors to falsely report and harass minorities and other vulnerable communities. It also doesn’t change the fact that gender, race, and sexuality are not sensitive social issues. Remove the fifth bullet point.

No more mealy mouth nonsense, you have taken how many dollars for pride themed cheers and now you're here trying to weasel your way out of asserting the queer people are not 'sensitive political issues' to be hidden. They exist, you've taken their money, now grow a backbone and stand by their right to exist. Do it or admit you're more interested in the feelings of bigots than you are the safety of human rights.

Your 'clarification' about the bullet point regarding 'sensitive social issues' in relation to LGBTQIA+ issues only further muddied the waters.

In the previous thread's comments, I stated an example where I, as a cis-male, straight identifying person, can run a D&D game online for several episodes and sessions, but the minute I introduce a gay character, suddenly it can be reported and decided by Twitch that my channel can be thrown behind a warning because I now have LBGTQIA+ content (not to mention most of my co-hosts are definitely Not Straight). Your answer said that we can talk about lived experiences for Queer Folks, which is an improvement, but now am I not allowed to discuss these topics because I am discussing it through the lens of a created queer character? Can I put them in a game, but only if their life experiences and their content doesn't hit some arbitrary Too Queer threshold? What happens when I add two queer characters? 5? 10? 30? How gay is too gay?

If TV or movie productions followed your rules, LGBTQIA stories wouldn't be told. And that's garbage, to put it nicely.

Because that's just an example of a creative that believes Queer stories deserve to be told. That doesn't even speak to the Very Real People that discuss serious how being queer affects their worldview. Not just in the realm of politics, but in way that they analyze media, how different stories within games, movies, and books affect them, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitch, you need to make a stand. LGBTQIA+ and immigrants have no place in obtaining a "Sensitive social issues" label any more than Christianity, cis-gender, or American do. And you can substitute any nationality or creed for that list. Every group that promotes unity, hope, visibility, and love deserves a place to have their stories heard, their games played, and a place to find like-minded fellows.

"Streams containing informational or educational content that aim to share knowledge in a neutral, fact-based manner, rather than engaging in any kind of advocacy for an issue or candidate." Go ahead and clarify this too while you're at it, Twitch. What, and how, would you measure something as "neutral" and "fact-based"? If I dive deep into scholarly, medical papers, and find information about being against vaccines, would you qualify that as neutral facts regardless of whether or not the paper(s) have been dismissed? They're clearly searchable from official academic and scholarly databases, sounds like they check out as facts!

How would you even keep track of what is and not a lived-in experience for THOUSANDS, if not, MILLIONS of people who stream on the site? Are you going to keep tabs on them off-site? Are you really going to rely on your automatic reporting tools for this? If a person wanders in listening to a specific streamer talk about SOMEONE ELSE'S lived-in experiences, are they fully allowed to report and force a label on the streamer? If another streamer talks at length about THEIR OWN LIVED-IN EXPERIENCES, and share experiences that inherently involve abuse BECAUSE of some radical form of religion, do they have to label their streams ahead of time, or label themselves from that point on, even if they were playing a video game?

Additionally, what happens when a viewer considers a streamer's MERE PRESENCE as "inflammatory" or "polarizing"? Your automatic reporting tools will do as expected, and with enough reports, will forcibly label that streamer regardless of their input. The report tool has been abused and it will be MORE abused because of your need to chronically and constantly catalogue speech into boxes despite how extremely easy it is to bend your words.

You will save yourselves an immense headache by removing the bullet points completely.

I hadn't realised until reading this post, but it's absolutely correct to point out that these new "clarified" guidelines functionally prevent anyone from actually being an ally to Queer people.
It also forces people to out themselves in order to speak about the very things that keep them closeted for safety reasons; the alternative being that they're slapped with a label that makes them a target and equates their existence with military conflicts.

If Twitch were to actually recognise these issues and not only change course but meaningfully act against bigotry on the platform, I'd switch from being irritated and ready to keep hammering them to being really quite appreciative.

It's incredibly bizarre that Twitch is still insisting on equating the existence of marginalised genders, sexualities, & ethnic/racial groups with coverage of military conflicts and actual political events.
Do they really not realise what they're saying when they lump those into the same warning label?

The new content classification for Sensitive Social Issues is tailor made for bad actors, and the 'revision' only further highlights the underlying issues. This will be used to hurt vulnerable communities on the platform, not maintain a safe or amicable space. It needs to be repealed, not revised.

This is an excellent point!

This "clarification" is still incredibly vague, and will still be used to target and mass report creators. The issue that Twitch refuses to acknowledge is simply that they are announcing open season on marginalized content creators. 'Streams focused on discussing topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion in a polarizing or inflammatory manner.' Twitch fails to realize that our very EXISTENCE is inflammatory in the eyes of bigots.

If I host a podcast talking about being queer, about the definitions of labels, about "perfectly packaged" things like how to build community, a pride festival merch haul, how I found out I was queer, ect. then that's great, perfect, non-inflammatory. I'll *probably* be okay, *hopefully*. There's maybe a 50/50 chance I get flagged or false reported anyway. If, on this podcast, I decide to acknowledge the discrimination that I face every day from cishet people, suddenly I'm flagged! 'Cause it's inflammatory to acknowledge that the majority (not all, but a lot) of bigotry comes from white, allocishet people, even if it's factual.

Even if I stick to the fluffy fun puppies and rainbows side of the discussion, I'm still being inflammatory to bigots because I dared to exist in a way that they couldn't ignore me. Even butterflies and flowers are repugnant to bigots, if those butterflies and flowers are gay (or pretty much any other form of marginalized identity). Queer creators, BIPOC creators, disabled creators, creators who have uteruses or who belong to non-majority religions, will all be more vulnerable with the possibility of these labels being weaponized against us.

We can't afford to have our ads cut, or worse, be banned. Marginalized communities already face financial insecurity at exponential rates, and a lot of us have Twitch as one of, if not the only, main sources of our income.

We can't risk this ambiguous new ruleset that any member of staff with a bias can take advantage of. That is, if we get flagged or mass reported and we happen to be lucky enough to even get a real live person to review our case. Do we risk talking about our lives for longer than 5 minutes? How long is too long? What is too inflammatory to whoever might happen to be watching?

Do you get it yet, Twitch? The mere existence of marginalized communities ignites searing hot rage in the hearts of bigots. You're just giving them more tools to beat us down with.

There was no clarification needed. Remove the bullet points concerning Queer and Trans creators entirely!

These guidelines will only put targets on our backs for bad actors to shut down our channels and lose our revenue (and yours!)

If this issue isn't addressed properly, we WILL move platforms, and take our audiences with us

Take our concerns of bullying and harassment seriously, for once

you can't compromise on this issue. if you give homophobic and transphobic people a foot in the door like this they will force it open and maliciously report us for talking about our own experiences. you cannot thread this needle, you can either enable bigotry or do your duty and nip it in the bud .

You didn't clarify ****, your language is still super vague and and can be easily abused by those working in bad faith.

Maybe listen to what people who are far smarter than me are saying in these comments this time? That may be a good start.

Yeah this ****** ******

I made a Uservoice post hoping to reclassify the LGBTQ+ Community as a Protected Group on Twitch. They totally missed the point of us speaking up. I truly hope this gets fixed.

Demanding a "model minority" through a vague and non-specific update is deceitful and harmful at best.

Not enough words can describe my outrage at this!

This is still unacceptable.

First, it is still ridiculous to treat peoples' right to exist as a 'sensitive issue', morally.

Secondly, you can't even handle bad actors coming into streams and arguing about pronouns, when those same bad actors report a stream for being too gay, that is YOUR time they're wasting, and YOUR actual streamers they're trying to harm. So, operationally, this bullet point shouldn't exist.

Subjective judgments based on who's in the chair on a specific day or automated systems will not be able to make the subtle distinctions that are being implied here, therefore there is no 'out' where this bullet point suddenly gets better managed, this just implies an immense amount of people to manage what will obviously be a proxy war against gay people via twitch's reporting system. That makes twitch not only wasting money to harm gay people, but complicit in the actions that will harm them.

If your goal is to 'inform people of content so they can make decisions about what to watch', why are LGBTQ+ issues called out as a specific bullet point and not, oh, the racism, sexism, and nazi behavior that is documented to hurt your image, your streamers, and your bottom line?

Stop trying to silence queer people. Anyone who wants a content warning for 'this person believes they should not be harmed and killed for nothing more than existing' doesn't want a content warning, they want a harassment target.

Sorry Twitch, but your attempt at "clarifying" is not enough. Who's to determine what is or is not "polarizing" about our existence? There is already a LOT of unscientific misinformation spread about trans people without a second thought by MANY mainstream outlets that are taken as truth by those uneducated about queerness.

Remove the "sensitive social issues" bullet point!

Twitch, you've failed entirely in addressing the issues and concerns that 38,288 people voted about. The fact that "sensitive social issues" is even a thing that can be reported now is an open door for bad faith, bigoted people to come into any stream they deem as "sensitive", and judging by how most algorithms treat streamers, you'll side with the comments without any serious review.

After all, you didn't seem to actually review what 38,288 of us said in the previous post about this.

We don't feel safe streaming. You don't make us feel safe streaming. You don't make us feel welcome. You don't make us feel like we matter.

You're making all of your LGBTQ streamers feel unsafe. Like you're still more than happy to let others label them as "other". I don't feel safe having my LGBTQ friends as cohosts on my stream, even though I myself am straight.

There's a lot of us who are ready to switch to YouTube streaming if you continue to disappoint us.