Twitch has worked hard to make its platform free of harassment and the company decided to punish users even those kinds of events occur off the platform.
Through a statement, the company announced that it has updated its community guidelines. With the change they made, they will be able to take action against users who engage in hateful and harassing behavior that occurs outside of Twitch’s services. As long as there is evidence of what happened.
Twitch’s new guideline will punish users for harassment
“Our current guidelines state that in some serious cases where there is available, verifiable evidence, we may take action against users for hateful conduct or harassment that occurs off Twitch services—meaning on social media, other online services, or even offline—when directed at members of the Twitch community,” the company mentioned in its statement.
But what are the negative behaviors that the company will consider serious and punish them even when they happen outside the platform? The company shared a list with examples that show actions such as explicit threats, lethal violence, sexual exploitation of minors, among others.
We leave you the list below:
- Deadly violence and violent extremism
- Terrorist activities or recruiting
- Explicit and/or credible threats of mass violence (i.e. threats against a group of people, event, or location where people would gather).
- Leadership or membership in a known hate group
- Carrying out or acting as an accomplice to non-consensual sexual activities and/or
- sexual assault
- Sexual exploitation of children, such as child grooming and solicitation/distribution of underage sexual materials
- Actions that would directly and explicitly compromise the physical safety of the community, such as threatening violence at a Twitch event
- Explicit and/or credible threats against Twitch, including Twitch staff
It should be noted that this list does not include all situations of harassment, abuse or bullying that Twitch will punish. In addition, the platform acknowledges that it is currently unable to investigate all conduct that takes place entirely outside of the platform that was not mentioned in the examples.
Now, what happens in cases of less serious harassment? Here the company will also take evidence of what happens outside the platform.
“For example: if we’re reviewing a harassment report about an incident that happened live on stream, related or continued harassment on Twitter could be taken into account when reported to us. This is how our current off-service policy works in the vast majority of cases, and will not change,” the company stated.
