Twitch reveals plan to stop child predation spreading across platform via clips

Twitch has revealed its plan to combat child predation on the platform as predators use clips to share explicit content of minors.

On January 5, 2024, Bloomberg published a report claiming child predators had taken to using the popular streaming platform Twitch as a means of sharing child abuse videos amongst one another.

Predators have reportedly been recording and posting sexually explicit videos that feature minors by using the Twitch “clips” feature — a feature that allows for 20-second snippets of any live stream to be captured and shared. Having analyzed nearly 1,100 clips alongside The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Bloomberg found approximately 7.5% featured children being sexualized.

Now Twitch is stepping in to put the illegal practice to an end, revealing a bulleted list plan to combat child predation on its platform.

In an email to Kotaku, Twitch shared its plan to combat the problem, writing, “Youth harm, anywhere online, is unacceptable, and we take this issue extremely seriously. We’ve invested heavily in enforcement tooling and preventative measures, and will continue to do so.”

To ensure the safety of its users and protect minors, Twitch has assured that live streams undergo “rigorous, proactive, automated screening,” with potentially harmful content and channels removed as necessary to prevent “the creation and spread of harmful clips at the source.”

Twitch has also dedicated teams to actively focus on preventing grooming and ensuring no one under the age of 13 can create an account on the platform. This includes additional models to detect grooming, preventing banned users from making new accounts, and a detection model for identifying users under 13 years of age.

“We also recognize that, unfortunately, online harms evolve. We improved the guidelines our internal safety teams use to identify some of those evolving online harms, like generative AI-enabled Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM),” the platform wrote in their email. “More broadly, we continue to bolster our parental resources, and have partnered with expert organizations, like ConnectSafely, a nonprofit dedicated to educating people about online safety, privacy, security, and digital wellness, on additional guides.”

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy also spoke to Bloomberg on the issue, echoing, “Youth harm, anywhere online, is deeply disturbing. Even one instance is too many, and we take this issue extremely seriously. Like all other online services, this problem is one that we’ll continue to fight diligently.”

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