Twitch overhauls its rules around harassment and hateful conduct

Today, Twitch is announcing changes to its policies around harassment and hateful conduct. The reason, the company says, is because marginalized people — “women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” the company wrote in a blog post — are disproportionately harassed on the site. The new policy is far more specific about what constitutes harassment and abuse. The larger changes include stricter protections around sexual harassment, the policy extending off platform to an extent, and that enforcement in cases that are harder to judge will rely on external signals that the behavior was unwanted (like channel timeouts).

A bigger overhaul has come to Twitch’s policy regarding sexual harassment; it’s now...

Continue reading…