Less than a week after rolling out a new rule requiring streams covering "politics and sensitive social issues" to carry a content classification label, Twitch has modified the policy to exempt streamers talking about their "lived experience."
"We have made some updates to our policy language to better clarify what needs a "Politics and Sensitive Social Issues" Content Classification Label (CCL)," Twitch wrote on X. "We want to make clear that you don’t need to label your stream if you’re talking about your lived experience. We’ve made this clearer in our CCL guidelines, which are linked below. We’ve also clarified that a label is only required if discussion of the listed topics is the focus of the stream.
"Our goal here, as with any CCL, is to give viewers and brands more info about what’s happening on a particular stream, so that they can make an informed decision about what to watch and where to engage."
The original policy on sensitive content was implemented after a month of escalating back-and-forth claims of Islamophobia and antisemitism on the platform, which resulted in a two-week ban of Zack "Asmongold" Hoyt over a racist tirade against Palestinians, as well as several Arab streamers who took part in a TwitchCon panel in which they ranked other streamers on a scale of "Arab" to "loves Sabra."
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said at the time that "there is no place on Twitch for racism, hatred, or harassment of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia," but the new rules raised the ire of LGBTQ+ streamers angry that the simple fact of their existence was suddenly considered "political." There were also concerns that they could suffer revenue losses as advertisers can, and often do, avoid streams with content warning labels, regardless of why they're applied.
The updated rules are aimed at addressing those concerns. Two of the examples cited as sensitive content in the original guidelines, "discussing ideological or socio-political views on topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion" and "discussing legislation related to a sensitive social issue such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, or immigration," have been removed. In their place is a single bullet point saying a warning label is required for "streams focused on discussing topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion in a polarizing or inflammatory manner."
It's an improvement of sorts, if only because it removes the explicit politicization of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights—human rights, in other words—and immigration, but it doesn't seem to have calmed the waters. Numerous replies to the announcement on X see the update as a change in wording but not in effect, in that it continues to center on the LGBTQ+ community. There are also questions about who will decide what qualifies as "polarizing or inflammatory": One commenter said trans people merely advocating for their own rights will be perceived and reported as such by right-wing Twitch viewers, and that the vague terminology in the updated guidelines doesn't remove the target placed on them.
A post on Twitch's UserVoice feedback forum calling for the initial "sensitive social issues" bullet point to be removed attracted more than 38,000 votes before Twitch closed the comments and announced the updated rules. A new post calling for the point to "be removed, not clarified," is now live and has thus far drawn more than 2,200 votes.
"It doesn't matter how much you 'clarify' the point of the final two bullets, they are not fit for the political category especially when contrasted with the other things in the category," the post states. "Putting peoples' rights in there opens up marginalized groups to hate and bigotry.
"At what point does something go from 'personal experience' to 'too political'? If a streamer talks about their own right to an abortion being taken away where they live, is that personal experience or political? It is entirely subjective. Is a trans person talking about their experiences with HRT 'fact based'? Who determines this? The bigots who will undoubtedly mass report said streamers to shut them up?"
Twitch's efforts to moderate political content come as the platform faces growing pressure over how it handles speech concerning Israel and Palestine, from streamers on the platform as well as outside organizations.
"I think the implementation of a separate category for politics in order to combat antisemitism is a faulty premise," streamer Austin "Gremloe" MacNamara told Aftermath. "Existence as a minority person, especially in a predominantly white male space, is a political act.
"If Twitch were serious about combating hate speech on the platform, the five banned Arab content creators are a perfect set of people to speak to about it, given that all of them have been begging Twitch to add [Middle East and North Africa] to their Twitch census data to no avail. It's cynical at best and cowardly at worst."
Ironically, at least some of its current troubles could have been avoided if Twitch had simply not opted to define LGBTQ+ rights as political. But it did, and now here we are, and I strongly suspect—as I did when the new rules were first rolled out—that this won't be the end of it.
