Twitch Releases Simplified Community Guidelines

Twitch revealed an overhaul and simplification of its community guidelines, stressing that the policies have not changed and remain intact. Vice president of trust and safety Angela Hession said in a statement, “Our community guidelines are the essential foundation for setting and enforcing expectations around what behaviors are allowed on Twitch. In a live setting, it’s particularly important to ensure that these guidelines are clear, as any potential harms evolve in real-time. We can’t rely on content removal to mitigate all harm that occurs live, so we partner with our community members to help uphold our policies proactively and issue suspensions to ensure accountability when they are broken. We know suspensions can have a significant impact on streamers’ revenue and momentum with their community, and we are always working to improve the clarity of our policies so that good-faith users can navigate them more seamlessly.” The Amazon-owned streaming platform said in a blog post Thursday that Twitch provided more context, clearer examples and “an easier structure with fewer sentences that were written by folks with law degrees,” adding that the goal was to make the community guidelines easier to navigate, more explicitly explain how they make the platform better and give users more overall clarity. Twitch provided a detailed overview of what was changed: More context was added throughout on why the policies were implemented.Real-life examples were added to explain guidelines and help users “make that leap from theoretical to practical.”Policies are organized under five high-level categories: authenticity; civility and respect; illegal activity; safety; and sensitive content.Some violations that were previously spread across different policies were regrouped into singe, more intuitive policy categories, such as all policies impacting users under 18 grouped under youth safety.Some existing policies that were previously included under other categories now have categories of their own, such as adult sexual violence and exploitation, prohibited games and sexual harassment. Twitch wrote in the blog post, “Our friends on the legal team were instrumental in helping us update the community guidelines. However, most people are not lawyers, so our policies need to be written in language anyone can understand. That’s why, during the drafting process, we hooked the legal team up to keyboards that delivered harmless but annoying electrical zaps whenever they typed something like ‘pursuant to’ or ‘hereinafter.’ OK, fine, we didn't do that, but we did try to cut back on legalese and opt for language that's easier to understand.” And Hession added in her statement, “These updated guidelines are a significant milestone in our ongoing efforts to improve clarity and, based on customer research and prior policy language updates, we’re hopeful that they will significantly improve our community’s clarity around our policies and our own team’s ability to enforce them quickly and consistently. We are always evolving safety at Twitch, and there is more to come when it comes to improving clarity and education around how we approach sitewide safety and suspensions.”

Streaming & OTT

Twitch Releases Simplified Community Guidelines

The streaming platform said none of its policies has changed

David Cohen

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David Cohen