In yet another modification to its policies about the matter, Twitch is restricting sexually suggestive material even further.
The streaming service will no longer accept livestreams that spend an extended amount of time showcasing covered personal body parts as of this Friday. They include, as specified in its amended community rules, the “buttocks, groin, or breasts.”
If that sounds specific, that’s because Twitch has become a very popular place to watch livestreams of everything from video games to ASMR. However, there has been tension with certain creators who have embraced mildly sexual content, like streaming from hot tubs or wearing skimpy clothing.
“We constantly want to create a friendly environment on Twitch. Since online behavior may change over time, we constantly review our policies to make sure they’re understandable and practical,” a Twitch representative said in an email on Wednesday. “Today’s update was meant to clarify what’s allowed on Twitch, while giving our community time to adjust and ask questions before enforcement begins.”
The e-commerce behemoth Amazon owns Twitch, and in recent months, it has made many changes to its standards in an attempt to find the ideal balance for what kinds of sexualized material are acceptable.
When the corporation chose to allow creative and digital renderings of fictitious nudity in December, it caused uncertainty. However, two days after announcing the new policy, the company reversed it.
CEO Dan Clancy said that users had voiced concerns about the kind of material that would be allowed and that some streamers had reacted to the announcement with video that violates the rules in a business blog post on the sudden reversal.
“After careful consideration, we have determined that this change was excessive,” Clancy wrote. “AI can be used to create realistic images, and it can be difficult to distinguish between digital art and photography. This presents a unique challenge for digital depictions of nudity.”
But even after the reversal, a contentious trend known as “topless meta” persisted: streamers would pretend to be naked on camera by hiding their body parts with black censor bars and other things.
Even though that workaround was appropriately classified as “Sexual Themes” and didn’t technically break any Twitch rules at the time, the trend forced Twitch to release another update to their policies in early January, which forbade streamers from implying that they might be fully or partially nude and made it clear that female-presenting streamers could only display cleavage as long as it was obvious what they were wearing.
Twitch has grown to be one of the largest livestreaming services worldwide since its 2011 start. Known mostly for its gaming and esports communities, the platform’s streamers have amassed substantial followings by doing things like having ordinary conversations, preparing food, and creating ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, content.
Additionally, some prostitutes have utilized the site to interact with visitors who could buy their more graphic material on other websites like OnlyFans. (Although those streamers aren’t allowed to connect directly to that kind of video, they are allowed to link to their own websites, which take viewers there.)
However, studies have shown that, regardless of whether they fill specific sexual niches, female livestreamers are often more sexualized. The peer-reviewed journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications released a research this month that examined roughly 2,000 well-known video clips that were gathered in 2022 from Twitch’s video game and real-world directories.
It was discovered that, in comparison to male streamers, women on the platform sexualized themselves more often and intensely. This was shown by the fact that they were more likely to dress provocatively, point the camera toward sexualized body parts, and strike poses that were likely to be seen as sensual or overtly sexual. The bulk of entries in the “ASMR” and “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” categories—which had the greatest number of sexualized streams—were also contributed by women.
According to the researchers, the fact that female Twitch broadcasters still make up a small percentage of the platform’s producers encourages some degree of self-sexualization in order to compete with male streamers in a “profoundly masculinized environment.”
“This creates an antagonistic, male-dominated atmosphere where hate speech directed towards women is propagated, encompassing intimidation, derogatory evaluations of their abilities, and suggestive remarks about their physical appearance,” the report said.
Twitch allows some latitude to various material categories as long as they are adequately classed as having “Sexual Themes,” which means they won’t be promoted on Twitch’s homepage, even if nudity and sexually explicit activities are absolutely forbidden.
The list of activities that satisfy the criterion includes dancing sensually, dressing in BDSM-related clothing without having intercourse, and having non-educational conversations about sexual experiences or subjects.
SOURCE: NBC NEWS
