Following some drama today (catch up on that in this reddit thread) that saw many streamers banned from Twitch, the CEO of Twitch, Emmett Shear, has issued an official apology to the public, which reads as follows.
We at Twitch apologize for our role in what has been an unfortunate and ugly chapter for the streaming community. We'd like to repair the damage that has been done to the relationship between Twitch and the Speedrunning community, in particular.
For context, here is a summary of the events as Twitch understands they occurred:
Twitch discovered that copyrighted images had been uploaded as emoticons to cyghfer’s chatroom on Twitch. Twitch policy clearly forbids unlicensed images from being used as subscription emoticons.
One of our staff members, Horror, notified cyghfer of this violation and removed the emoticons. Additionally, of the three emoticons which were removed, only two were actually unlicensed. One of them was actually licensed under Creative Commons and should not have been removed. We have notified cyghfer of our mistake in this matter.
Several Twitch users begin looking into our general policy for emoticons on Twitch, as they felt this policy was being enforced unevenly. One discovered the NightLight emoticon, a globally available emoticon, had been promoted to global status as a personal favor. It was clearly a licensed image however, as it had been commissioned explicitly as an emoticon for the Twitch site. The NightLight emoticon should not have been approved as a global emoticon and has been removed by request of the channel owner.
In reaction to this discovery about the NightLight emoticon and the previous emoticon removals, many users began to make jokes and other much less funny derogatory and/or offensive remarks in chat. Additionally, many of these users began harassing our staff and admins outside of Twitch chat using other social media channels.
Horror then banned many users from the Twitch site for this behavior. Harassment and/or defamation of any user on the site, including a staff member, is clearly against the Twitch terms of service. Some of the banned user’s remarks clearly cross this line, and those users were correctly banned. Other users made more innocuous remarks and should not have been banned. Horror was too close to this situation and should have recused himself in favor of less conflicted moderators. Being personally involved led to very poor decisions being made.
This whole situation began blowing up outside Twitch, including but not limited to Twitter and Reddit. One of our volunteer admins took it upon themselves to attempt to censor threads on Reddit. This was obviously a mistake, was not approved by Twitch, and the volunteer admin has since been removed. We at Twitch do not believe in censoring discussion, and more to the point know that it’s doomed to failure.
We take this incident very seriously and apologize for not better managing our staff, admins and policies regarding community moderation. There were several key mistakes made by Twitch in this process:
We failed to provide a valued partner with proper support when we needed to remove their unlicensed emoticons
We allowed a questionable emoticon to be made available in global chat
We failed to properly train our staff members to recuse themselves from personally involved situations, and as a result poor moderation decisions were made.
We did not have the structure or training in place in our moderation policies and training to deal with this episode properly.
What we're doing now and in the future:
Twitch users who were unfairly banned due to this incident are being systematically unbanned today.
The Twitch partners who were banned due to this incident have been provisionally unbanned pending investigation.
The NightLight emoticon has been removed.
Disciplinary action is being taken with regard to Twitch staff and members of the volunteer admin team who overstepped their authority.
Due to this incident, we are embarking on a full review of Twitch admin policies and community moderation procedures.
Horror has voluntarily stepped back from public facing moderation work at Twitch, as right now pretty much every moderation issue will be tainted by this episode.
In Our Defense:
Note that harassment and defamation (as opposed to criticism) of Twitch employees, partners, users, broadcasters, and humans in general is strictly prohibited by our terms of service and remain grounds for removal. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated. Users who committed acts of harassment or defamation will remain banned. Feel free to complain, protest, petition, etc. if you feel Twitch is making a mistake. Don’t harass or defame people.
Twitch staff did not ask any reddit moderators to remove or censor any threads.
“Twitch Administrators” are volunteer moderators who are not employed by Twitch. The activities depicted here and being falsely attributed to Twitch staff were undertaken by a volunteer admin who has since been removed from the program.
If you have further questions or comments, feel free to contact us directly via email at [email protected]. Due to high expected volume, please be patient with us for responses in general on this topic.
