A win for female streamers?

Twitch has streamlined its sexual content policies to make them less confusing – especially for women on the platform.

Instead of having two separate policies in the community guidelines for sexually suggestive and sexually explicit content, as well as an additional section in the Content Classification Guidelines to address sexual content, the rules are already placed under a single Sexual Content Policy.

The updated policy is more lax in what is allowed on the platform – albeit with proper disclaimers.

The New Dos and Don’ts of Sexual Content on Twitch

✅ Content that “deliberately highlights breasts, buttocks or pelvic area” is allowed with the appropriate tag

✅ Fictionalized (drawn, animated or sculpted) fully exposed breasts and/or genitalia or buttocks, regardless of gender, are allowed with tags. “There is a thriving artist community on Twitch, and this policy was overly punitive and did not reflect the impact of the content,” Hession wrote.

✅ Body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or bottoms regardless of gender, as long as Twitch’s dress policy complied with are allowed with labels

✅ Twerking, grinding and pole dancing are now allowed without a tag.

🚫 Fictionalized sexual acts or masturbation remain prohibited

🚫 Erotic dances and the like that are streamed inside an adult entertainment establishment are not allowed

Content Classification Labels

In June, Twitch introduced Content Classification Labels (CCL) so that streamers can alert users if their stream contains sexual themes, gambling, vulgarity or other mature content. With appropriate labeling of sexual content using CCLs now available, “we believe that some of the restrictions in our previous policies are no longer required,” Angela Hession, Twitch’s chief customer trust officer, wrote in a blog post yesterday (Dec. 14). The updates will “reduce the risk of inconsistent enforcement and bring our policies more in line with other social media services,” she added.

The Amazon-owned streaming platform will ease the blanket ban. In the future, failure to label sexual content could lead to penalties, such as warnings, but not suspensions, Hession wrote. Twitch will automatically apply tags to sexual content that lacks tags — and repeated lapses in tagging content can result in a tag being “temporarily locked from the stream.”

Female Twitch streamer banned

Not only were some of the earlier restrictions subjective, they were also “out of line with industry standards and resulted in female-hosting streamers being disproportionately penalized,” Hession argued. For example, on December 11, Twitch streamer and OnlyFans model banned Morgpie three days after she went viral because she was supposedly bare in her streams – but she didn’t explicitly show anything more than her bare shoulders, upper chest and cleavage.

“No one is violating the terms of service. Me standing here like this, it’s just my shoulders,” Morgpie, who is fully clothed in a tube top and jeans in the behind-the-scenes video of her “topless meta” content, said to Dextero. “It’s just the implied nudity that really freaks people out, I think.”

Several other female streamers are confused that they have faced penalties for “sexually suggestive” content for things like play along, wear a sports bra to the gymor wearing a dress that their nipples show through.

Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, who gained immense popularity with her dividing whirlpool currentsTwitch said cut off her advertising revenue indefinitely without warning or exact reason in May 2021. “This is an ALARMING precedent and serves as a stark warning that while content may not ostensibly violate Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, Twitch has full discretion to target individual channels and ban them in part or in whole to demonetize for ” she tweeted at that point.