Twitch Finally Gets Around To Letting Banned Streamers Know Why They Were Banned
from the victory! dept
We’ve covered Twitch’s no good, very bad time for many months now, which should give you an indication just how bad this time has been. If you need a brief background, the major points of contention have been the Amazon-owned company having a laughably one-sided approach to DMCA takedowns of content, its complete inept method for temp-banning its own creative community over copyright claims, and its totally vague approach to banning creators over various rule-breaking when it comes to Twitch’s indecipherable guidelines and the capricious manner in which it applies them.
While all of it is frankly bad, the lowest hanging fruit in all of this has always been the lack of communication Twitch has offered its own creative community when it comes to bans, copyright issues, or guidelines. For instance, Twitch, at first, would just disappear content, with little or no notice to the streamer who authored it. When it has given any notice to creators, that notice has traditionally been so devoid of any details so as to be entirely useless. Which I suppose is why the recent announcement by Twitch that it will finally tell streamers who have been hit with a copyright takedown what that infringing content is… is good?
The days of Twitch mysteriously suspending popular streamers are coming to an end. The Amazon-owned streaming platform announced yesterday that it will now actually tell streamers who get temporarily banned why they’ve been punished. It only took 10 years, folks.
“As of today, enforcement notifications sent to suspended users will include the name of the content and the date of the violation to ensure they have better clarity about what content is being actioned on,” Twitch Support wrote on Twitter. Based on a sample screenshot, these new explanations will include what the streamer did that violated Twitch’s Terms of Service or Community Guidelines and which stream it happened on.
So, again, this is a good thing, except, as the opening Kotaku graf hints, this announcement also highlights the absurdity of Twitch not having been doing this the entire time. And this should really also callout the minimalist nature of the “infringement” in question, which oftentimes involves video game audio assets that are part of a Twitch stream, or background music and whatnot. In other words, the need for this level of detail, though definitely crucial, also should let you know that these streamers aren’t trying to infringe copyright. If they were, there wouldn’t be so much confusion over why they were being banned or having their content taken down.
All of this certainly isn’t lost on the very community Twitch is now trying to placate.
Twitch was founded back in 2011 and later acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion. It’s a big business, but only because of the content put there by others. Telling creators why they’ve been occasionally locked out of what is for some a defacto job is the least Twitch could do, though still far from what a lot of users would ideally like. Even now Twitch Support’s announcement tweet for the ban explanations is littered with complaints about the lack of transparency and communication around things like the appeals process.
In other words, now that Twitch has gotten things to where they probably should have been at the jump, the real work to win back its community begins.
Filed Under: content moderation, copyright, dmca, information, policy violations, rules, streamers, takedowns
Companies: twitch
Comments on “Twitch Finally Gets Around To Letting Banned Streamers Know Why They Were Banned”
“As of today, enforcement notifications sent to suspended users will include the name of the content and the date of the violation to ensure they have better clarity about what content is being actioned on,” Twitch Support wrote on Twitter. Based on a sample screenshot, these new explanations will include what the streamer did that violated Twitch’s Terms of Service or Community Guidelines and which stream it happened on.
One would hope the screenshot then is more indicative of a better notification than that suggested by the Twitch Support quote. There could be a whole lot of stuff to guess at between a date and a name.
Seriously, whether in-house automation or phoned-in complaints ding a recorded stream, they already know what the exact reason is or there wouldn’t be an "action". Bloody hell.
I expect the **AA’s to be screaming how unfair this is to them, no one should be able to know why the corporations have found them guilty, they are afterall evil evil pirates stealing billions from them because people will watch streams of other people playing games to steal their music.
Maybe a bunch of the largest/most popular streamers should get together and start releasing streams where the game video and audio is completely blacked out. Just the player playing the game and commenting on what the viewers can’t see or hear. Then tell their viewers, "Sorry you can’t see or hear the game, but this is apparently what we have to do to avoid getting copyright strikes on Twitch. If you’re unhappy about this, maybe you should let them know."
I don’t like this one bit. It’s much more fun to listen to people freak out and make shit up about why they were banned.
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True. That and viewer comments. Almost always as bizarre and ignorant as the platforms and the copyright industrial complex.
Finally they added transperency to the user?!?
So incompetent, previously allowing out-of-control anonymous takedowns. Just wow they finally did it.
Eagerly looking forward to the first examples of notification
When people get these notifications, I expect some of them will post the charges somewhere. It’ll be interesting to see the specifics and how contentious the cases become. It seems likely some of the takedowns will result in, "Oh, yeah, I guess so", a lot of "Mah Freedom!", and some "Oh, come on."
At one point a state was trying to set up some official process to ensure people got the reason for their ban is post deletion. I don’t agree with the government doing it, but just deleting posts/accounts without telling people why is completely unproductive and it’s frustrating how many mindless automoderators patrol the tubes, completely incapable of detecting any context, let alone sarcasm. YouTube’s is the worst and I’m honestly starting to believe it’s biased against left wing opinions.
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Not opinions, words. I’ve heard many Youtubers say videos are at the very least automatically demonetized if not blocked completely simply for speaking specific words. Some of the euphemisms they come up with, especially for The-Virus-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, are totally hilarious.
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Facepalm… I mean Facebook, is notorious for their unpublished list of bad words or acronyms or in relation with nonpraiseworthy verbiage.
That far eastern country with the scarlett political group giving instructions that must be followed else one would experience unwanted attention is a prime example. Mentioning any part directly results in an ambiguous suspension of this post is against tos.
would be nice if they followed through with this
they just straight up lie. it’s been almost 2 months since they suspended my account and i never received any response indicating why i was banned. no emails besides the automated "Thanks for contacting Twitch Support." after using my account for 8 years and giving hundred of dollars in subs, they leave me in the dirt and won’t even look in my direction. it’s really seeming hopeless
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