‘Community is at the heart of everything we do’: A Q&A with Twitch vp of trust and safety Angela Hession
Twitch is the most active gaming community platform on the web, and it shows no signs of slowing its momentum in 2022.
Gamers watched over 24 billion hours of content on the livestreaming service last year, according to a recent report by StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg — a 45% increase between 2020 and 2021. During the same period, users viewed 5.3 billion hours of content on Facebook Gaming, with YouTube Gaming taking third place in the race for the attention of the livestreaming audience.
With such growth, the Amazon-owned streaming platform has experienced some growing pains. Last year, many Twitch creators were forced to endure orchestrated “hate raids,” waves of anonymous users inundating streamers’ broadcasts with mean-spirited messages. These raids primarily targeted smaller or mid-size streamers — particularly those in marginalized communities, such as female streamers and creators of color. “You have to constantly tell yourself that this is happening to everybody — it’s not just you,” said prominent Twitch creator ARUUU. “You’ve got to keep going and continue streaming, because the moment you start to show any weakness, it gets even more aggressive. They’re going to keep doing it until you stop streaming, which has happened with a bunch of Twitch streamers.”
Last month, Twitch’s global vp of trust and safety Angela Hession penned an open letter acknowledging the presence of hate raids on the platform and listing the tools and policy changes that Twitch has created to protect its community from targeted harassment. The letter outlined updates to the platform’s harassment policies and announced the creation of the streaming industry’s first off-service conduct policy.
Twitch is constantly updating its safety and privacy tools, per Hession, and the changes listed in the open letter are just the tip of the platform’s safety iceberg. Digiday caught up with Hession to learn more about Twitch’s current approach to user safety.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
In your open letter, you wrote that Twitch’s updated hateful conduct and harassment policy takes a clearer and tougher stance on harmful behaviors. What exactly does this mean?
This was a policy that took a lot of time, a lot of feedback. Hateful conduct and harassment have always been prohibited on Twitch, and we’re constantly looking at our policies to see how we make them clearer. What we did was that we broke out hateful conduct, and harassment and sexual harassment, and we provided specific examples for people to understand what we meant by that.
I think giving examples really helps our marginalized creators and people that are impacted by hateful conduct or harassment to understand how to report it. So the fact that we broke all of those out, and we gave specific examples, has really helped our report validity rate. For hateful conduct alone, our report validity rate went up by 4x. And for harassment — which I think is more difficult, because it’s very contextual — we saw user report validity go up 5-6x. So …read more
Source:: Digiday