The Rules in Practice: Ambiguity in the Twitch Community Guidelines
The Twitch Community Guidelines are a set of documents that contain rules and expectations that the company Twitch expects their users to follow. It sets site-wide expectations and guidelines for creators and viewers alike. Twitch considers the Guidelines “a living document that we regularly update based on the evolution of the Twitch community and service,”1 so it is worth noting that the versions of the guidelines that I will be analyzing are from early 2023, and may not be exactly the same at the time of disseminating the final iteration of my project. The reason I am examining the guidelines is because they play an important role in understanding harassment on the platform in that they establish what is and is not supposed to be allowed on a site-wide scale. Furthermore, they are interesting when put into the context of what is actually happening within the community—are the guidelines actually being followed by community members? Does the harassment that is against the rules still occur? Additionally, previous analyses of the guidelines have criticized them for having language with underlying sexist biases, and I am curious if the current iteration still has those issues or if there has been some improvement on that front.
Overall, I found the section on sexual harassment in the Twitch community guidelines more thorough than I had initially anticipated. However, while Twitch provides ample examples of what could qualify as sexual harassment or harassment in general, they do not provide any sort of clear, direct definition of what is or is not sexual harassment—this lack of explicit definitions remained an issue throughout many sections of the guidelines. For example, the guidelines provide hyper-specific examples, such as stating that “suggesting that a person’s channel is only popular or has not been banned due to sexual favors,” is a form of sexual harassment, without giving general guidance or a clear definition of what constitutes sexual harassment. Despite the lack of clarity in regards to a direct definition of harassment, the guidelines seem pretty comprehensive, which is a good thing. Yet, something that comes up for me in this regard is the fact that people still face harassment on the site. If the guidelines are improving and becoming more comprehensive, why is it not working? It is possible that these additions are reducing levels of harassment, but not fully eliminating harassment, but from a viewer’s perspective, harassment still feels extremely commonplace within the community.
Another section of the guidelines that, while in some ways improved from previous iterations, yet could still use some work is the “sexually suggestive content” section. A major issue that comes up when examining this section is, again, a lack of definition. The site provides examples of what could be considered sexually suggestive but does not clearly define what they mean by sexually suggestive. Again, they provide hyper-specific examples of sexually suggestive content without providing a clear definition as to what sexual content actually is. For example, they say that “content or camera focus on breasts, buttocks, or pelvic region, including poses that deliberately highlight these elements,” qualifies as sexual content, but they do not provide a clear definition of sexual content. Having a lack of clarity poses a big problem as it makes it difficult for users to successfully follow expectations when those expectations are not made explicit. As Ruberg said in their piece analyzing a 2019 iteration of the Twitch community guidelines, “these documents place responsibility on streamers’ shoulders, while also ignoring these streamers’ agency to determine the nature of their content and their own self-presentations.”2 One of the responsibilities that falls to the streamers is interpretation due to lack of clarity—this means that genuine misinterpretations of expectations could lead to temporary or even permanent banning from the site, which, for full-time streamers, would be detrimental. For example, one section of the guidelines on sexual content states that “pole dances or acrobatics with sexually suggestive framing” are considered sexually suggestive content, but they do not provide a definition of “suggestive framing.” As such, it seems reasonable that someone could accidentally infringe on this rule, resulting in a temporary or permanent banning from the site, which, assuming the streamer was generating revenue from the site, would halt an income stream until their ban is lifted. As Zolides puts it in an analysis of a 2019 iteration of the Twitch Community Guidelines, “how sexual content is classified and discussed in the Twitch Community Guidelines is notable in that specificity is purposefully avoided to allow not only wide-ranging applications but also less accountability on the point of Twitch.”3
The attire section, which is dedicated to enumeration of what kinds of clothing users are permitted to wear while visible on stream, is much more well-defined than I was expecting, I believe it has been updated since the pieces I read about Twitch’s guidelines were published. However, the use of the phrase “those who present as women” is used here multiple times, which is confusing and potentially problematic. In the context of the community guidelines, I want to consider a recent event. Popular Twitch streamer F1NN5TER, or Finn, recently tweeted about being temporarily banned from Twitch for three days. Finn publicly self-identifies as a cis, straight, man and has made a career out of crossdressing—he specifically identifies with the terms crossdresser, not drag queen from what I have gathered. He stated that he was temporarily banned for fixing his bra on stream while wearing fake breasts which Twitch determined was an instance of “prolonged touching of female presenting breasts,” making it an infraction of the guidelines. Notably, this section of the guidelines does not provide specification as to whether or not it means “prolonged touching” by oneself, someone else, or either. This incident with Finn exemplifies what both Ruberg and Zolides argued in their respective academic articles “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming,” and “Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch’s Community Guidelines,” in regards to the ambiguity of the guidelines. However, it is worth noting that this incident involved a cisgender man, which does complicate the idea that these ambiguities disproportionately impact women, but, as he was engaging in crossdressing when the infraction was observed, it follows that this section of the guidelines could disproportionately impact the drag community on Twitch, which is growing.4 The guidelines tend to stay away from using words like “men” and “women” seemingly in an attempt to be more inclusive—obviously working towards more inclusive language for all gender identities is important and a good thing—but their use of “female presenting breasts” is ultimately more confusing as someone who is a cisgender man was impacted by this section of the guidelines.
Overall, the Twitch community guidelines have made some significant improvements in regards to their specificity in the past few years. However, despite improvements, there is still room to grow, with the guidelines lacking clear definitions on important topics, such as their lack of a distinct definition of sexual harassment. Furthermore, these improvements raise an important question: as the guidelines become more comprehensive and begin to eliminate sexist language baked into the expectations of the site (see Ruberg “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming” and Zolides “Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch’s Community Guidelines” and the end of the background section of my project statement available on the homepage of my site) does the space actually get better for women and non-binary individuals?
Footnotes
- Twitch Community Guidelines in Introduction to Safety on Twitch
- Bonnie Ruberg, “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 6 (2021) 1695.
- Andrew Zolides, “Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch’s Community Guidelines,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 10 (2020) 3013.
- Matthew E. Perks and Christopher J. Persaud, “Beauty from the Waist Up: Twitch Drag, Digital Labor, and Queer Mediated Liveiness,” Television & New Media, Vol. 23, no. 5 (2022).