Twitch To Punish Users For Offline Conduct

A streaming platform, Twitch, recently announced in a blog post the expansion of its off-service misconduct service.

This would allow the platform to take action against anyone who harasses members of its community.

It doesn’t matter wherever it happens, on the site, offline the site, and on another social media platform.

This came in as a result of its commitment to facilitating a vibrant and enabling environment.

The platform said this can only be achieved if the users of the platform feel safe, secured and protected.

The updated off-service policy, Hate Conduct and Harassment Policy, is geared towards issuing enforcement against accounts that oppose its commitment.

The company has defined some of the offences as terrorism activities/recruiting; deadly violence and violence extremism; leadership or membership in known hate; threats against its staffs; involving/being an accomplice in non-consensual sexual activities.

Twitch believes that anyone who can engage in any of the following activities listed above would be more likely to engage in the behaviour on its platform; which would violate its community guidelines.

Previously, the policy would review offences that take place on and offline of the platform.

That is, if the platform is evaluating a violation that happened on the platform, it would take into account related off-service reports on the violation.

If Twitch can verify reported behaviour that is related to an incident on its platform, it would be able to use it as concrete evidence to support its enforcement decisions.

Going forward, If Twitch discovers a serious offence that poses a risk against the community, it would take action even if it is not on its platform.

However, the evidence must be verifiable; so it would involve public posts and contents that were uploaded by the violator.

Twitch examines its policy around misconducts

The expansion is coming after Twitch examined some of its conduct policy around December last year.

There was a surge of sexual harassment on the platform that was detrimental to the community; people complained that the platform had not taken action towards it.

It happened that some of the cases were on the platform while some others were outside the platform but it involved people in the Twitch community.

Twitch said that the policy would be a lot stricter around sexual harassment and abuse.

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Twitch’s enforcement decisions

As a consequence to anyone who violates its guidelines, even those who are yet to be users of its platform, Twitch plans on applying a standard of punishment to them.

For those who are yet to register as a member of the community, they would be prohibited from registering. And if they manoeuvre their way to do so, it would lead to a termination of the account.

While those who are already on the platform would be warned and if the report persists, are banned from the platform.

However, accounts that submit several fake reports would also be considered punishable and be banned.

Also, Twitch would consider law enforcement actions that would access the credibility of accusations and evidence.

That is, it plans on involving third-party law experts to assist in the investigation of such cases, especially cases outside Twitch.

However, the investigation would take substantial timing and resources because of its complexity.

“For behaviours that take place off Twitch, we must rely more heavily on law enforcement and other services to share relevant evidence before we can move forward.”, said a spokesman for Twitch

The platform urged users to report any of the cases listed above through its off-service investigation team.