Twitch wants to challenge Tiktok. According to Bloomberg, the effort has raised concerns, as the company has shortcomings in moderating its content.
Twitch’s own clipping function allows you to cut live broadcasts and share clips. Although the function is designed for good, it is also used for more sinister purposes. Adobe Stock
- Twitch plans to challenge Tiktok with video clips cut from live broadcasts.
- Bloomberg found that the clips contain a lot of sexual content, even about children.
- The lack of moderation of clip content has caused concern.
Last spring, a 12-year-old boy started a Twitch stream as usual and filmed himself eating a sandwich and playing the French horn. The mundane and rather innocuous broadcast soon had a dozen viewers.
American Bloomberg’s soon one of the viewers encouraged the boy to do a flip live. Another asked him to show off his muscles.
Moments later, the boy lowered his pants in front of the camera, prompted to do so.
The situation was over in seconds, but someone recorded a video clip of the flash using Twitch’s own editing tool.
In Twitch, the username and profile of the user who made the video clip is displayed in connection with the clip. This is how Bloomberg found out that the person who recorded the clip follows more than a hundred user accounts on Twitch that appear to belong to children.
“One incident is too many”
Bloomberg took a closer look at the world of Twitch clips. Of the 1,100 Twitch clips viewed by the editor, 83 contained sexual or sexually colored content related to children.
In no less than 34 of these clips, a child between the ages of 5 and 12, most typically a boy, showed his genitals to the camera. In many of the videos, the child introduced himself to the camera at the request of the viewer, and in other video clips it seemed to be about grooming.
Amazon-owned Twitch removed the clips after Bloomberg reported them to the company.
– Even one case is too many, and we take the matter extremely seriously, CEO of Twitch Dan Clancy told Bloomberg.
According to Clancy, Twitch works with “a number of different parties” to detect child abuse material and has made “significant progress” in eradicating it.
Twitch’s clipping function was launched in 2016. With it, for example, the viewer of a game stream can cut a twenty-second clip of, say, a nice goal or other individual performance in a game. Other users will also see a cut clip of the situation.
Moderation needs improvement
Twitch is said to be planning to challenge Tiktok by offering clips cut from live broadcasts as an easy-to-consume stream in a Tiktok-like way.
Bloomberg says that the efforts have raised concerns, as the company still has a lot to do in moderation. For example, Twitch has an age limit of 13, but despite that, many children much younger than this use the platform to stream their daily life or gaming.
Bloomberg reports that Twitch has since made it difficult for users who have broken the age limit to join the platform with a new ID. Grooming is being tried to be prevented with, for example, language analyses, while nudity is being tackled with the help of artificial intelligence.
Although Twitch has employees monitoring the content of live broadcasts, the moderation of video clips cut from the broadcasts has been completely dependent on notifications made by users, according to Bloomberg.
Official help?
Director of the Canadian Center for Child Protection Stephen Sauer told Bloomberg that corporate self-regulation simply isn’t working.
– For 25 years, we have followed how these companies practice voluntary regulation, Sauer stated.
– Far too many children are exploited on these platforms. We want the government to intervene and tell companies what kind of security mechanisms they have to implement, he continued.
According to Sauer, child abuse is not limited to watching a clip cut from a Twitch broadcast within Twitch, as it is easy to spread the material.
Source: Bloomberg