Twitch U-turns on its sexual content policy, banning nudity from the platform

Following a huge outcry across social media platforms, Twitch is rolling back some of the changes made in their updated sexual content policy. Going forward, real and fictional nudity are once again banned outright on Twitch.

In an update posted to Twitch's safety centre, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced that Twitch will now be "rolling back the artistic nudity changes" made earlier this week. These changes had initially allowed artists to show mature, nude content on the platform, without requiring age verification, on a platform with a large, young audience of children.

When Twitch updated the sexual content policy to allow nudity on the platform, many creators and influencers voiced their concerns regarding the changes. While some bemoaned the presence of such content on a streaming platform that's focused on gaming, the majority were concerned with how accessible the mature content was, particularly for younger viewers.

In light of Clancy's statement, it's much clearer why Twitch made changes to its existing policy. Many challenges are arising as a consequence of how realistic AI-generated images are becoming, and Twitch had evidently created these guidelines with a specific focus in mind.

However, allowing nudity, real or fictional, to be broadcast on one of the largest streaming platforms without introducing appropriate restrictions, such as age identification, was an extremely naive move from the streaming platform. Even though Twitch required mature content to be classified as such, artistic nudity was frequently being promoted at the top of Twitch's "Art" category, even for accounts with their age set to 13.

Clancy did express that he wished that "[Twitch] would have predicted this outcome", and apologised for any confusion caused by the change. It doesn't seem as though any streamers who showed nude content that adhered to Twitch's guidelines will face any retrospective punishment, but Clancy did clarify that there were streamers that "created content that violated our new policy", and appropriate enforcements would be issued.

This is probably only the first of many challenges we'll see caused by generative AI on Twitch, as the technology becomes more popular and widely used. However, if Twitch doesn't respond to these issues with a bit more wisdom and nous in the future, they'll not only come up against their streamers, but from their advertisers too.