Mandatory phone number verification, moderation updates, and the acquisition of Spirit AI, Twitch further strengthens its arsenal to combat sexual predators.
Twitch: the n°1 streaming service wants to protect the youngest
Twitch is THE streaming platform par excellence. Since its launch in 2011, the site with the famous purple logo invites you to share a moment of your life as a gamer with the whole world. Today, Twitch is close to 15 million users a day. and since its acquisition by Amazon in 2014, the platform continues to evolve and bring together an ever-wider audience.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also played a big role in this growth of the platform. When the planet seemed to stand still, Twitch beamed. These periods of confinement were therefore an opportunity for neophytes to embark on the great adventure of streaming.
But who says dazzling growth, also says excesses and therefore much more severe moderation.
It is therefore with many updates and improvements that the Twitch teams are trying to make day after day their platform healthier and more secure. Via a blog post the streaming site therefore shared its latest initiatives to fight against grooming on line.
Twitch goes to great lengths to limit grooming
Before explaining to you precisely what the new measures put in place by Twitch are, you must first of all know what the term “grooming” means. Grooming is a practice that some malicious adults use on social networks, discussion forums, streaming sites to prepare children to be abused by pretending to be children themselves.
At Twitch, they consider grooming “as imminent harm, which is one of the highest classifications possible for a threat. This is not the norm in the industry given the number of types of child pornography and serious violence that different platforms strive to prioritize, but at Twitch it allows us to dedicate resources to it. and additional expertise to address it. »
As a matter of fact, the primary objective of the streaming platform teams is to keep children as far away from Twitch as possible. You may not know it, but to have an account or publish content on the site, you must be over 13 years old. The new measures put in place by Twitch extend the signals that the No. 1 streaming company uses to catch and terminate accounts belonging to users under this age limit.
Here are the improvements implemented by Twitch:
- Mandatory phone verification before ‘potentially vulnerable accounts’ go live
- Updated the site’s default privacy settings for its direct messaging system and for Whispers
- Teams worked with expert organizations to understand grooming behavior on site and in the wider industry
- Acquisition of Spirit AI
The blog post ends with the following words: “Eradicating violence against children requires the collective and constant participation of all corners of the Internet. Criminals evolve, and our work to counter their efforts will never be done. » Even if we can blame Twitch for a lot of things, it must be recognized that the platform does everything possible to make its site and its application an ever healthier space.