Twitch released today its first transparency report ever, outlining its efforts to protect the 26 million people who visit the site daily. In terms of transparency, Amazon’s decade-old service has caught up a lot.
Twitch benefited from a 40 percent increase in channels between early and late 2020, threatened by the popularity of live technology and video games throughout the pandemic. However, the explosive growth is also the biggest challenge for the company when it comes to harassment and hatred. Unlike recorded videos, live content is often spontaneous and short-lived. Things just happen in front of live audiences of thousands or tens of thousands. This could include 11-year-olds playing live Minecraft—To expose them to potential predators – to the now-banned game celebrity Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm streaming from a public bathroom at E3.
In its new transparency report, Twitch acknowledges this issue and provides, for the first time, specific details on how well it moderates its platform. Although the findings are encouraging, Twitch is not yet as transparent.
Twitch early on gained a reputation as a hotspot for toxicity. Women and minorities who streamed on the platform received targeted hatred from audiences who were hostile to people who they said deviated from stereotypes. Twitch’s vague guidelines regarding so-called ‘sexually suggestive’ content served as fuel for self-appointed anti-boob police to mass-report female Twitch streamers. Volunteer moderators oversee Twitch’s quick conversation to pick out harassment. And for problematic streamers, Twitch relies on user reports.
In 2016, Twitch introduced an AutoMod tool, now enabled by default for all accounts, that blocks what AI sees as inappropriate messages from viewers. Like other major platforms, Twitch also relies on machine learning to point out potentially problematic content for human review. Twitch has also invested in human moderators to review tagged content. Yet a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that nearly half of the Twitch users surveyed showed harassment. And a 2020 GamesIndustry.Biz report quoted several Twitch employees who described how executives at the company do not prioritize safety tools and do not talk about hate speech.
During this time, Twitch did not have a transparency report to make clear its policies and inner workings to an abusive user base. In an interview with WIRED, Twitch’s new head of trust and security, Angela Hession, says that security in 2020 was Twitch’s ‘biggest investment’.
Over the years, Twitch has learned that harassing harassers can take advantage of its vague community standards, and in 2020 released updated versions of its guidelines “Nudity and Wear”, “Terrorism and Extreme Violence” and “Harassment and Hateful Behavior”. Last year, Twitch appointed a safety advisory board for eight people, consisting of streamers, anti-bullying experts and social media researchers, that would draw up policies to improve safety and moderation and healthy flow habits.
Last fall, Twitch led Hession, formerly head of security at Xbox. Under Hession, Twitch eventually banned the display of the Confederate flag and black face. Twitch is on fire, she says, and there’s a big opportunity for her to see what security looks like there. “Twitch is a service designed to encourage users to feel comfortable expressing themselves and entertaining each other,” she says, “but we also want our community to always be and feel safe.” Hession says Twitch has increased its content moderators by four times in the past year.
Twitch’s Transparency Report serves as a win for its recent moderation. AutoMod or active moderators touched more than 95 percent of Twitch content during the second half of 2020, the company reported. People who reported receiving harassment via Twitch received a 70 percent drop in the same period. Enforcement actions increased by 788,000 in early 2020 to 1.1 million by the end of 2020, reflecting the increase in users, according to Twitch. User reports also increased from 5.9 million to 7.4 million during this time, which in turn attributes Twitch to the growth. The same for its channel ban, which increased from 2.3 million to 3.9 million.