Amazon Twitch: Curation, Manipulation, or Exploitation Issues?
August 12, 2019
One of the DarkCyber research team plays games. The rest of the group try to ignore the revolution. Someone at Engadget is into games. We determined this by reading “Ninja Calls Out Twitch after His Dormant Channel Highlights Porn.” “Ninja” is an Internet star who plays games. Ninja had a channel or stream on Amazon Twitch. Ninja left Amazon Twitch for Microsoft’s game streaming service. (No, DarkCyber did not know MSFT was into online games, but obviously with a big star like Ninja, MSFT is more than the red ring of death game console.)
The story is a vector for Ninja’s allegations that Amazon Twitch did a bad game player thing. Ninja’s channel — no longer used by Ninja — became a promotional vehicle for other Twitch gamers. The horror apparently was Hollywood all the way. Plus Amazon Twitch’s quite interesting moderation system allowed Ninja’s dormant channel to be to be used by other Twitchers to stream porn. This is bad, it seems, because the Twitch users wanted to watch Ninja play games, not watch actual humanoid interactions.
The write up points out:
We’ve asked Twitch for comment. Whatever its response, this isn’t a great look for the service. It was no surprise that Ninja’s stream would scale back (Twitch partners aren’t allowed to stream on rival services), many only expected it to remain idle, not become a billboard for other broadcasters. It certainly underscores the significance of Ninja’s switch. His leap to Mixer represented a competitive blow, and Twitch clearly wasn’t happy about it. Update 8/11 5:55PM ET: That was fast — Twitch has already reverted Ninja’s old page to a regular offline screen, including chat (where people are roasting Twitch as we write this).
A couple of questions:
- Does Amazon Twitch have a method to use unused channels to promote other Twitch streams? If so, what is it? Happenstance, a SageMaker function, or a rule book?
- What will Amazon change to prevent porn from being displayed to the young people who follow popular gamers like Ninja?
- Does Amazon monetize questionable content; for example, SweetSaltyPeach now banned and brought back as RachelKay and similar streamers who appeal to teen agers?
Amazon Twitch, in its own way, is behaving in a manner which might/could develop into a formal investigation by an appropriate US government entity.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2019
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