On December 13th, 2023 Twitch heralded a massive change to its content policy for streamers. Moving forward, if properly tagged, the platform would allow for "artistic nudity" in its Art tab and streaming category. In its initial statement about its policy regarding artistic nudity, Twitch vice president of customer trust Angela Hession stated "We have received consistent feedback from streamers... that it can be difficult to know how their content will be interpreted." The original policy stated:

Previously prohibited but now Allowed With Label:

• Content that ‘deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region,’ even when fully clothed. Streamers found it difficult to determine what was prohibited and what was allowed and often evaluating whether or not a stream violated this portion of the policy was subjective. In addition, the former Sexually Suggestive Content policy was out of line with industry standards and resulted in female-presenting streamers being disproportionately penalized.

• Fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender. There is a thriving artist community on Twitch, and this policy was overly punitive and did not reflect the impact of the content.

• Body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks regardless of gender. The Twitch Attire Policy already allows body art on breasts and buttocks, so this change makes these policies consistent.

• Erotic dances that involve disrobing or disrobing gestures, such as strip teases.

So, it sounded like a victory for adult content creators and those in the adult art community, which was kind of cool to see. And then, in pure Twitch fashion, its leadership announced this policy change, did not properly equip its moderation and safety teams with the tools to enforce this change, and the entire art portal got inundated with porn. Obviously, for those with half a brain, artistic nudity is not softcore porn or hardcore pornography, but Twitch simply did not respond quick enough after making this announcement to enforce that point of differentiation. As a result, and possibly due to other factors, Twitch completely walked their artistic nudity policy. Twitch announced on December 15th, 2023, about two days after the initial announcement about the policy change:

First, we want to make clear that some streamers, in response to this update, created content that was in violation of our new policy. We’ve worked quickly to remove that content and issue channel enforcements.

However, there also was a great deal of new content that was allowed under the updated policy. Much of the content created has been met with community concern. These are concerns we share. Upon reflection, we have decided that we went too far with this change. Digital depictions of nudity present a unique challenge–AI can be used to create realistic images, and it can be hard to distinguish between digital art and photography.

So, effective today, we are rolling back the artistic nudity changes. Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games. You can find emote-specific standards for nudity and sexual content in the Emote Guidelines. We aren’t making other changes to the updated Sexual Content Policy.

Honestly, Twitch not even bothering to find a way to filter or moderate those that wanted to follow their initially announced "artistic nudity" policy versus that wanted to use the TOS change to make porn is a bummer. However, there's likely another reason why they walked all of this back. Twitch's leadership for what feels like the past five years have repeatedly shot from the hip when trying the waters with new policy changes. Every time they have tried to rock the boat even slightly, they have been met with backlash, which results in them needing to change things either all the way back to something entirely different.

Also, I bet the issue with Twitch is that advertisers and their owner, Amazon, put their foot down after the TOS announcement and can almost guarantee Twitch's management did not pass it by them even the slightest bit. Repeatedly, it seems like the Twitch leadership doesn't actually talk to their ad and streaming partners or Amazon overlords before trying new policy changes.

Personally, despite what all of the toxic bad actors on the internet might tell you, I think there's way more distressing content that requires a huge public outcry than nude boobs or depictions of genitalia on Twitch. But if Twitch wanted to go that route, they likely would need to create an entirely different platform and I would also hazard to guess that there's no way Amazon wants to go that route.

I’m kinda mad at everyone here. Twitch with dumb policies and planning and idiots who just had to shitpost too close to the sun and ensure that nobody could have nice things.

The Just Chatting & Art categories on Twitch has a lot of content that only real purpose is to skirt as close as possible against the tos for views, it would probably be better for Twitch in the long run just to outright ban it.

Don’t see why Twitch shouldn't have a Adult section. They pretty much have every thing else on their site. All they need is a paid subscription that is a decent price. Not cheap, but not too expensive. And a clear Adult's Only disclaimer.

I wish I could be as grossly incompetent yet well paid as Twitch executives/management.

Twitch really should just branch off its sexualized content into its own thing. Having the Twitch front page being a combination of gaming content and a softcore onlyfans alternative just really doesn't make sense. I get that sex sells and always will, and I don't have a fundamental problem with content like that existing, I just don't think it makes sense mixed in with a bunch of gaming content.

Twitch branched off from Justin TV back in the day to put all the gaming content in one place, maybe something similar needs to happen again with the Just Talking category. Give that content its own space where it can exist on its own with the TOS around sexual content more relaxed and refocus twitch itself on games. Of course, that would require them to admit that their platform makes a ton of money on sexual content and basically create a streaming site that has the explicit purpose of titillation and I don't think they're willing to do that, even if it improves their platform for viewers looking for both types of content.

The wording I saw around the original "changes" is that they weren't actually changing any rules, just rewording the policies to make it clearer what was and wasn't already allowed. So the second ruling actually made things more strict than they were originally.

This phrasing is also very strange: "Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games." Why say "regardless of the medium" if at least one medium isn't included in that? What if a game isn't rated? What if it is rated but not as Mature because the depicted nudity didn't push it that high?

You can buy porn and sex-related items on Amazon, so they're not completely against it. I'm surprised by how many people are/were complaining, like showing nipples is so much worse than showing everything but the nipples. I haven't really seen anything I wouldn't have expected to see on Twitch before any of this happened.

And our weird fucking distinctly American hangups about boobs and butts continues unchecked, forever and ever, amen.

Twitch obviously doesn't want to ban bathtub and cleavage streamers because they make so much money off of them, but it's still bizarre to me that their solution was to just... make it legal on their TOS and they didn't think there wouldn't be any pushback. I don't think it's unreasonable or too puritan to suggest that those people who don't want to see that content, including a huge audience of children, shouldn't be exposed to it. I don't go looking for that content but every time I open Twitch it suggest those channels to me in a way that I can already tell from the thumbnail what's happening there.

They really should just open an adults-only section that would be separated from the rest of the site, but again it's very obvious why they don't do that because then they would be asked to do age-verification on that section and they intentionally and willingly want to peddle this content to children. The Internet just fucking sucks.

Just Chatting is embarassing

They put some additional tools and measures in place with the change, including not putting streams with certain tags on the front page. Their content tagging system has developed a lot recently, so as long as things are tagged properly, you shouldn't be seeing anything you don't want to, other than maybe thumbnails and stream titles in the recommendations bar down at the bottom.

I opened up one stream a year ago of a pretty lady with ginormous boobs jumping up and down or something, and now half the suggested streams are always various ladies with ginormous boobs covering only their nipples jumping up and down.

It's 90 percent there already. Seems foolish not to work it out so that these streamers can just do their thing and get paid. Sure there are a ton of places on the Internet where people can live stream themselves doing sexy stuff, but they clearly have an audience / mod team on twitch already.

@splodge: If you click the three dots under the thumbnail you can hide streams this will start filtering the home page, all I see is Total War streams. This stuff is easily avoidable, but Twitch's algorithm is really aggressive.

Okay but why would streamers self-report themselves and have them filtered out from a bigger market? Or is there some sort of an automatic system that does that against the streamers wishes? The Hot-tub/Pools category is probably closest to what Twitch gets to admitting that this is just softcore porn, but most of the streamers are doing "Just chatting" which is way too broad of a category to hide. No streamer is ever going to admit that they have their cleavage out for views and they'll get offended if someone says that. And not to mention those who are lazily playing a video game (mostly idling in it while they are chatting), I have no problem with the video game they're playing and I don't want Twitch to hide all instances of a certain video game just because one streamer I didn't like was on it.

Twitch is never going to figure this out. They're always either never going to care enough to do this right or are always going to be scared off by the prospect of losing advertising. There are other platforms out there for streaming 18+ art. The best Twitch will ever do is to just let artists promote they're accounts there if this is something they actually care about.

It's truly baffling how useless they are at times. Anyone who had spent any amount of time on the internet could have seen this coming. I wouldn't be shocked if there were people within Twitch screaming at them not to do this because it was so obviously going to blow up in their faces.

This and several other previous decisions also give the vibe that the people making most of the decisions don't actually understand Twitch and don't spend any time using or even looking at their own service. Had they seen any of the hot tub or Just Chatting streams that were already on the border of breaking TOS they would have known the second the let up on the rules those streamers would push into territory uncomfortable to advertisers primarily targeting teens and 20-somethings. Like this isn't some fancy in-depth analysis, it's taking five minutes to look at what's on the front page or at the top of a couple of the biggest categories. It like they can't even be bothered to do that.

@apewins: Self reporting is better than the alternative a Twitch ban, some revenue is better than none at all. I mean its a relatively easy fix, just create an 18+ tag and if needed age gate it like YouTube or any other platform.

Shucks, came close to actually making a twitch account

@thepanzini: Self-reporting doesn't work because as Twitch themselves have admitted they are applying rules inconsistently, small time streamers can and will risk getting banned for trying to expand their audiences, and bans that range from a couple of days to a couple of weeks don't scare anyone.

The problem with any type of an 18+ tag is that it would be an admission that the content is pornographic and that would bring all kinds of unwanted attention to the site. And in any case the industry has somehow landed on the idea that as long as a nipple or a hole isn't showing then it's good to go for all ages, and some streamers are really pushing that up to a limit.

@ben_h: A post explaining the second update, written by the CEO, Dan Clancy, actually uses the words "I wish we would have predicted this outcome".

@apewins: Twitch will almost instantly remove copyright content like live sports and issue perm bans, every weekend you'll see steams popup with live sports literally lasting minutes. Not having clear guidelines is probably the bigger issue, not enforcement.

YouTube locks 18+ content behind an age gate requiring a registered card, both for titillation and more extreme violence with an outright ban on pornographic content. The difference being content is monetize differently fewer companies want to advertise on 18+ content, this would also help Twitch steer its content in a safer direction.

The hot tub streams etc are already filtered within existing channels. The tags on Twitch are their to boost discoverability having say a provocative tag and having a place for that type of content would be better than it being within the chatting & art categories which it is atm. Streamers are already self-reporting every stream is tagged in some way.

Now where am I going to go on the internet to find boobs?

@thepanzini: I don't know why you're bringing copyrighted content into this conversation, that is automatically moderated and removed because they don't want to get sued and even with Bezos lawyers they would lose. Although I have seen a few channels that are just running 90s popular sitcoms without any commentary 24/7 that weren't at least immediately taken down.

But I feel like I am repeating myself, the whole point of the nudity streamers is that they insist that they aren't nudity streamers. And that's why they are absolutely not going to tag themselves as such. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing. I'm sure there are some who have done the math and figured out that they can earn better just by being honest, but the Internet is just full of people looking to abuse existing systems and that's why self-reporting is never going to work.

@apewins: One of the tools Twitch uses to remove copyright content Rekognition is also used to remove exteme violence and nudity.

The hot tub streams have been relegated to the Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches tag, its an example of self-reporting working with Twitch's moderation tools.

@shindig:

Not just boobs, but artsy boobs

A lot of people have been asking about why Twitch doesn't just create its own platform for hosting adult-oriented streams when Amazon already sells sex toys and even adult films, and the difference is a bit complicated. First, PornHub ruined everyone's ability to make money on the internet on adult content, even individual adult sex workers and content providers, for everyone. After the site got caught hosting people engaging in sex trafficking and did nothing to stop such activities, it led to almost every single credit card issuer suspending the ability to use their credit cards for the purchase of digital pornography and they all re-assessed their programs for issuing credit to digital adult platforms. While PornHub was absolutely guilty, their incompetency led to a growing body of political pressure from right-wing elements that pressured credit card issuers and processors to react accordingly. Currently, MasterCard actually has the strongest anti-porn rules and others are slowly but surly following their suit.

This is part of the reason why OnlyFans almost needed to pivot to be non-pornographic. They literally could not find a single financial institution willing to issue them credit or to process their purchases. In some countries, it is down to just Visa because the political pressure is that strong.

Amazon could technically fight back considering they are too big to fail or not issue credit or accept payments from. That still would not change the fact that it would be a fight they may or may not want to have and it definitely would not stop some of the biggest names in credit processing from being selective about what divisions of Amazon they would work with.