Twitch is back “cracking down” on lewd content again baby. This time the streaming giant has apparently updated their TOS in response to “emerging behaviors” perpetuated by streamers wanting to test the boundaries of the platform’s rules. For context, emerging behaviors probably refers to the several lewd streamers’ ever present efforts to try and bring sexualized content to Twitch through loopholes. Love it or hate it, the platform is designed for anyone 13+ to sign up and view. The devs don’t seem to want to age gate or place the adult-targeted streams behind a wall so it’s inevitable for Twitch to want to fight back. In theory that is. 

The reason I put “cracking down” in quotes is because Twitch never seems to actually crack down on these sexual streams. Every few months a change is announced to the TOS. The streamers adapt and find new ways to skirt the rules. A few, if any, are banned and face a few days of being offline as a repercussion. Then they replan their approach and figure out a way to abuse the TOS without being banned. Twitch refuses to crack down on popular female streamers in the space. People and investors get confused why nothing is being done to stop the rise of whatever current sexual trend is “the new meta”. The TOS is updated with a few changes that aren’t thorough. Thus the cycle repeats itself. Even now, looking at Twitch’s tweet to address the situation it seems horrendously vague. What is a “prolonged period of time”? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? An hour? People were already speculating that the new meta will be for cam girls to set up a network of 3-4 different camera angles/body parts and then cycle through them. That way no singular part will be focused on for a prolonged period. Reading this makes it seem like even Twitch themselves don’t want to actually put rules or punishments in place that would put an end to this cat and mouse game.

I understand wanting to limit the amount of adult content on a 13+ platform, but as long as the showrunners show unfair bias in favor of light punishments on the biggest perpetrators and the TOS writers keep coming up with vague rules prone to loopholes, this cycle will continue. There’s a ton of money to be made in the lewd industry these days and adult content creators don’t want to miss out on the large audience that Twitch has. A one week ban or less is nothing compared to the amount of new OF subscribers they can redirect from Twitch in the time they were able to go live and build their following before being hit. And after the one week ban, they just have to read the latest TOS, follow the new “emerging behavior” and get back to it. Did you hear about Twitch’s latest crackdown? Will it fail like all the previous iterations? Does Twitch actually want to stop this from happening, or just say they do for their investor’s sake? Set up five cameras, rotate them on an automatic timer, and avoid the new rule in the comments below!