An update to Twitch’s terms of service allowed for “Artistic Nudity” where streamers could draw and present nudity as long as it was meant to be artistic in nature and not sexually explicit. Less than two days after the Community Guidelines update, Twitch has walked back those changes. This is the culmination of a week-long degeneracy campaign from Twitch.
Twitch’s recent change to allow artistic nudity on the platform has wreaked havoc on the site, with many of the streams becoming focused on explicit and borderline pornographic content. ‘X’ user @JakeSucky decided to make the situation known to Twitch personnel by signing onto Twitch under an account opened by an assumed 13-year-old. After bypassing the usual TOS roadblocks, he was able to view drawn nudity and exposed female streamers directly from the home page.
As a result, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has spoken on the matter and decided to revert the change. “Upon reflection, we have decided that we went too far with this change.” Clancy explained.
Moving forward, real or fictional nudity depictions won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. While nudity within video games will still be permitted with specific titles, artistic nudity of any form is now banned.
This TOS blowup is another result of Twitch laying down it’s standards of what’s acceptable. During The Game Awards, there was a unexpected viewing of the usual fare that has been flooding the main Twitch page, showing a stripper.
Twitching The Algorithm
Over the weekend of December 8, a new ‘meta’ gained popularity on Twitch after streamer, cosplayer, and OnlyFans model ‘Morgpie’ went viral on social media; where the broadcaster was seemingly topless. Viewers on Twitch were left baffled after a woman’s topless broadcast seemingly skirted the platform’s guidelines, going viral on social media and sparking backlash online. Three days later, Morgpie was banned, leading to the significant changes made for streamers.
Twitch, once considered the safest streaming platform, has faced criticism for its strict TOS, which prohibits offensive, disturbing, and mature content. However, the arrival of streaming competitor Kick, a live streaming platform, changed the landscape with their lenient TOS, allowing streamers of various content, including artistic nudity and gambling. In response to feedback from streamers regarding its guidelines, Twitch rolled out a massive update to its “Approach to sexual content” on December 13.
The site allowed live streamers to be more transparent about their activities—but only if they properly tagged them. Among them were:
- Content that deliberately highlighted br**sts, bu**ocks, or pelvic regions even when fully clothed.
Fully exposed female character that is fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculptured) and displays br**sts, get*als, or bu**ocks regardless of gender. - Regardless of gender, body writing is done on females who display br**sts and/or bu**ocks.
- Er*tic dances involving the disrobing process or disrobing motions, like the str*p tease.
Nowadays, popular dances like pole dancing, grinding, and twerking are accepted without a label.
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In an extensive post, Twitch clarified a few major changes for the update, where they also admitted that its previous outlook on this content “Was out of line with industry standards and resulted in female-presenting streamers being disproportionately penalized.”
Some streamers have discovered specific strategies for optimizing their channels – something popularly called a ‘meta. This current kerfuffle rings quite similar to the ‘hot tub meta’ chaos of 2021, which resulted in Twitch creating a separate category for ‘Pools, Hot Tubs & Beaches. Many Twitch streamers and viewers were unhappy with this change, and still more are demanding action from the platform regarding this latest viral ‘meta.
Lyss, a Twitch streamer known for playing Call of Duty, has been passing off links to OnlyFans as promos for her channel. On Twitter, she disclosed that she has been sharing Instagram stories with a “OnlyFans” button that genuinely directs viewers to Twitch and her streams. As a result, she attracted over 2100 new unique viewers and reached her highest peak viewership to date of about 1050, nearly twice as many as she had before. Furthermore, in the past few days, she has added over 1100 new followers, which is remarkable for a streamer of her caliber.
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The Artist As Ban Fodder
Ironically, with Twitch’s new reformed ‘mea culpa’, regular art streamers on Twitch are getting banned en masse after the platform allowed ‘artistic nudity’ in its guidelines; causing the site’s Art category to be overrun with explicit content. It wasn’t long before Twitch’s art category was filled with explicit streams, with users all over the net sounding off about the many sexualized anime, Vtuber, and even furry art broadcasts they were seeing on the platform.
A few of these streamers claimed that they were drawing nude characters on stream when they got banned, despite allegedly correctly labeling their stream with ‘Sexual Themes’. Art that is less exploitive are also receiving the ever-present banhammer.
Twitch itself stated in its post that “There is a thriving artist community on Twitch, and this policy was overly punitive and did not reflect the impact of the content,” – referring to its guidelines that previously prohibited such content.
Let us know what you think of Twitch and their new streamer policies! Leave a comment!
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Just rename it “Just Fapping” already.