Mentioned in this article
- Twitch has promoted other channels on Tyler “Ninja” Blevins’ channel since he exited the platform for Mixer.
- The automated recommendation system recently promoted a channel airing pornographic material, and Blevins took to social media to express his disapproval.
- Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has apologized on social media, adding that the account airing lewd content has been suspended.
Following Tyler “Ninja” Blevins’ exit from Twitch in favor of an exclusive partnership with Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer, the more established livestreaming service has attempted to promote other personality channels by airing them as suggested content in the space that was previously Blevins’ channel.
Recently, however, the attempt at growing publicity for other streamers took an inappropriate turn when a channel promoted on Blevins’ former channel was airing pornographic material, something that is against Twitch’s terms of service.
Immediately after the incident, Blevins took to Twitter where he vented his frustrations regarding Twitch in a video.
Disgusted and so sorry. pic.twitter.com/gnUY5Kp52E
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019
“My team and I have made sure that the transition went incredibly smooth, super professional. We haven’t said anything bad or negative about Twitch because there really hasn’t been any reason to,” Blevins said in the video. “Over the last couple of days, there have been some things going on that we let slide. They were kind of annoying, little jabs we felt like, but it didn’t matter, we wanted to stay professional.”
Just a few hours after that, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear took to Twitter to respond to and apologize for the incident. He also wrote that the account in question that was airing pornography had been suspended and that Twitch has suspended the recommendations that it was giving out on Blevins’ page as well.
2/ This helps all streamers as it creates new community connections. However, the lewd content that appeared on the @ninja offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service, and we’ve permanently suspended the account in question.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
4/ On a more personal note, I apologize want to apologize directly to @ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
Lastly, Shear publically tagged Blevins in the post to “apologize directly” to him saying it “wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses.”
In the past few months, there has been an issue on Twitch with some streamers using the platform to broadcast lewd content. Despite Valve’s online card game Artifact having few players and influencers, there are people who have notoriously used the category to broadcast pornographic material and other lewd content to the point that in June, Twitch filed a suit to find the identity of individuals airing such content.
