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"The company said users will be able to report such behaviors but it may also investigate cases proactively, for instance if there is a verified news report tha

• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > we've arrived at "innocent until accused" instead of "innocent until proven guilty" For a platform like Twitch, this is fine. They have a brand. They’re akin to a modern television channel, and television has always been this ruthless. There are lots of other streaming sites.
  • fX0rObfoMN4 6y ago
    If someone who stream on Twitch does something bad off of Twitch, would people blame Twitch for that? I know I wouldn't.
    • Analemma_ 6y ago
      People can, and do. At any given moment you can probably find at least one hashtag campaign excoriating Twitch for having not banned some streamer for something for other.
    • beej71 6y ago
      Depends on what they did. If Twitch lets, say, the Unibomber stream video, it looks bad to advertisers (Twitch's customers). They don't want to be associated with that. It all makes sense when you look at it from a money angle rather than an ethical angle.
    • rodgerd 6y ago
      The context is that the last six months or so have been a shitstorm of prominent streamers caught in various forms of grooming, sexual assault, and so on. Much of this has happened off-Twitch, but it's certainly affected the reputation of Twitch to be associate with such. It's no different to the owners of M:TG banning people for serious misconduct, for example.
      • Ekaros 6y ago
        To me it sounds very similar to M:TG banning people for bringing up and reporting that kind of misconduct in their community...
    • DavidVoid 6y ago
      They wouldn't blame Twitch for what that person did, but they would blame Twitch for continuing to host them on their site. For example: if Twitch hosts a well-known sexual abuser and groomer who's known for taking advantage of vulnorable fans, then people will be rightfully upset with Twitch for giving them an audience. This is why Ryan Haywood got permanently banned from Twitch. Some of his victims and many of his former fans reached out to Twitch and said "hey, this guy is an abusive and manipulative piece of shit who will take advantage of vulnerable fans if he gets the chance. Please don't provide him with a megaphone and a potential audience."
  • aeturnum 6y ago
    I agree that twitch is within their rights. I also think we're within our rights to pressure them to adopt standards we would like. The law has long recognized different rights for "public figures" and private citizens, and I think that most Twitch users are better understood as private citizens. Even if I felt the behavior policing history of media was perfect (I do not), I think this is different in important ways.
    • FuckButtons 6y ago
      I think that’s exactly what is happening though, they’re adopting the standards that their advertisers, and by extension their users want.
      • pope_meat 6y ago
        ...I don't know, I'm a user, and uh, I hate the advertisers, and their dumb standards, they're killing creativity, only allowing brand safe content to exist, and be consumed. I think that's an overall net negative for the users. The need to make everything conform to advertisers is destroying the online spaces we congregate on, making them shallow, and vapid feeling.
    • Pfhreak 6y ago
      > I also think we're within our rights to pressure them to adopt standards we would like. I think this is what's happening, it's just that the users of Twitch want something different than what you want. You might think they're the vocal minority or something, but Twitch is almost certainly making a data driven decision here.
      • aeturnum 6y ago
        I am sure there are many different groups here! But yah, there are definitely folks that will be happy. I was just trying to say that, beyond Twitch being within its rights, people can still yell at them and say they shouldn't (or should) do it. No need to leave it at "this is legal and in line with previous behavior."
  • tastygreenapple 6y ago
    It's fine without boundaries - just as we accept that restaurants can have dress codes, it's not okay for those dress codes to be filters for the undesireables. I can imagine twitch's standards will be applied differently for different protected classes - does anyone expect twitch to treat women and men the same? Black and White the same? It's going to be pretty problematic when some groups get banned for things that other groups wouldn't be banned for
  • throwaway3699 6y ago
    Twitch is not a television channel. Twitch is tens of thousands of television channels.
    • alacombe 6y ago
      Be careful, it's almost as if Twitch was to qualify as a "common carrier"...
      • ghufran_syed 6y ago
        what would be the implications of that?
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    >For a platform like Twitch, this is fine. They have a brand. As someone who does not operate a streaming platform, I don't care whether they have a brand or not - I care about the pragmatic benefits of living in a society where principles like innocent-until-proven-guilty are available and practiced in a way that benefits average people like me. I think the number of people who would consider "they have a brand" to be a good justification can't be higher than the number who own major brands.
    • leephillips 6y ago
      Nobody is “innocent until proven guilty”. You are either, as a matter of fact, innocent or guilty. Our constitution prohibits the government from depriving you of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. But Twitch, or I, or you, can make up our own minds about your innocence or guilt, trial or no trial, and proceed according to our rights and inclinations. That right, the freedom of association, is as important as the right to be free of penalty from the government absent due process.
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        Due process was invented for a reason, and that reason is that innocent people like us do not like being unjustly punished. Any entity powerful enough to deliver an unjust punishment qualifies for the reason that due process was invented.
  • exolymph 6y ago
    ethics =/= legality
  • sigzero 6y ago
    This is not "fine". This is in fact "bad".
  • SkyBelow 6y ago
    This does not scale. Imagine if every grocery store, doctor, and gas station decided to deny someone service because of an unproven criminal charge. Given that innocent people are charged with crimes they did not commit, the morality of denying someone for something they do not have control over is the same in this case as in cases involving protected classes.
• weego 6y ago
  Presumption of innocence is a legal principle and does not and will never apply to a corporation providing you services at their own discretion.
  • TechBro8615 6y ago
    This is such a lazy argument that I'm so tired of hearing applied to quasi-public services. Maybe Twitch isn't a great example, but a few social media sites are. They might not be the government, but they're platforms with billions of people on them. Justice Thomas recently pointed out that we'll soon have no choice but to grapple with this distinction and determine how principles like the First Amendment apply to non-governmental public forums. I think it's a bit naive to hand wave it away as "if it's not the government, the principles of free speech don't apply." Maybe not legally... yet... but when people complain about this, it's the spirit of the 1A that they're concerned about, and I hope that some forthcoming legal doctrine will provide some legitimacy to their concerns so I can stop hearing this trite counterargument of "muh facebook isn't the government."
    • weeblewobble 6y ago
      It's not a lazy argument, you're just tired of hearing it. It's actually a very strong argument. "quasi-public", "maybe Twitch isn't a great example", "maybe not legally... yet", "some forthcoming legal doctrine"-- these are weak qualifiers. What are you proposing, exactly? How many users is a service allowed to have before their content moderation policies are nationalized? Somewhat ironically, whatever you're proposing would almost certainly require weakening the first amendment. Personally, I'd prefer a strong first amendment (which is concrete and actually means something) to the nebulous "spirit of the 1A".
      • MikeUt 6y ago
        > What are you proposing, exactly? Do you require a detailed solution before you will even admit there is a problem?
      • TechBro8615 6y ago
• Barrin92 6y ago
  Given how likely it is in the future that we're going to see more Christchurch like 'livestream terrrorism', combining media spectacle with violence this is completely reasonable. If there's indication that you may use Twitch for that kind of thing not letting you on the platform makes sense. We need to stop throwing 'cancel culture' at everything. If you're known to be an advocate of violence or a lunatic they don't let you on public television or radio either.
• Bud 6y ago
  "Cancel culture", of course, is a deliberately-misleading epithet, used by the right wing to describe the phenomenon of people being held accountable by society for their conduct. This phenomenon is not "toxic"; it's long overdue and it's deeply healing to society. It's how society is supposed to work. It's how it needs to work.
  • colejohnson66 6y ago
    The claims of "cancel culture" may well be from people who should be "shunned from society" (as some would say), but it's very true that some people (definitely not all) "practicing" cancel culture can have a "guilty until proven innocent" mindset. Being correct often does not mean you're always correct; The left is not immune from hiveminding. I say this as a left leaning person.
    • adzzzz 6y ago
      It's not even left leaning thinking. It's just socially extremely progressive neo liberalism. Most marxists would be aghast at the idea of siding with giant corporations to unperson and deny dignity to an individual with a non mainstream political opinion or what have you.
  • Veen 6y ago
    Yes, mob justice and public humiliation are very useful when people do and think things you don't like. Just what we need to deeply heal our damaged society.
    • Bud 6y ago
      Except there was no "mob justice" here; you are overreacting and using terms that should be reserved for violent consequences in situations that do not justify such words. I understand why you have to exaggerate, though.
      • Veen 6y ago
        And I can understand why you have to minimize. Although, I don't understand how anyone fails to fear the consequences of "people being held accountable by society for their conduct"—an idea that gladdens the hearts of authoritarians, sectarians, and zealots who are absolutely convinced of their righteousness and moral superiority. It will not result in healing, but in deeper division and ever greater polarization. Healing starts with forgiveness and compassion, not with insults, firings, banishments, purity spirals, and language policing.
• thelean12 6y ago
  I'm not sure why you say "arrived". People have always been fired for arrests at some companies. Twitch is basically their employer, so it's not much different here. Whether it should be allowed or not by law can be a different discussion, but we don't have to pretend that this is new
  • madamelic 6y ago
    >Twitch is basically their employer, so it's not much different here. Oh awesome. I am sure Twitch streamers are looking forward to guaranteed minimum wage, paid time-off, health insurance, etc.
    • thelean12 6y ago
      What's your point? Does it change my point if they're considered contractors vs employees vs hobbyists vs whatever?
      • anoncake 6y ago
        Since your point is that "Twitch is basically their employer", whether they're basically employees is relevant.
        • thelean12 6y ago
          Anyone with substantial following, who would be most likely to get snitched on with this new policy, will be making money from twitch. It doesn't matter to me how you categorize that relationship, my point is valid. "Basically employees" was a plenty fine layman's categorization, though. We aren't lawyers here.
  • ipaddr 6y ago
    Twitch is not their employer. Twitch collects money from them.
    • vkou 6y ago
• ABeeSea 6y ago
  Freedom of Association is a 1st amendment right. That isn’t cancel culture (which isn’t a real thing.)
  • mlindner 6y ago
    If it isn't a thing, why does a wikipedia page exist for it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture You can say you disagree with "cancel culture" being used pejoratively, but it absolutely exists in the minds of many.
    • ABeeSea 6y ago
      Lots of things have wiki pages. Godzilla has Wikipedia page and exists in the minds of many. Doesn’t mean Godzilla is real.
• adventured 6y ago
  Identity politics is all about witch hunts ultimately. It requires targeting, attacking, hunting and splitting people by tribes. If there are not enough targets, more will be made by inventing new divisions. Once you begin dividing people so aggressively by identity - as is happening now - cultural war inevitably breaks out. Tribalism always leads to conflict. What Twitch and all other social media platforms have begun doing is an inevitable consequence of that cultural war, they're very willing participants. You want a prediction for the future re this subject that is a certainty? The big tech companies will require (and will deploy) military style protection and will have to wall off their campuses in the not very distant future. No other outcome is possible given where things are heading, the cultural tension will keep rising until it explodes.
• PeterisP 6y ago
  Presumption of innocence and proven beyond all reasonable doubt is the bar that has to be met in order to put someone in prison. However, people are completely entitled to decide to shun someone or not do business with them based on mere suspicion or some arbitrary subjective standards (with certain narrow exceptions e.g. discrimination of protected classes) - "freedom of association" is the default condition and a key freedom, people and companies are free to choose with whom they want to (not) associate. Freedom of association is not absolute, some limitations can be justified (the discrimination laws are a good example) but there does need to be a solid justification and specific serious harm prevented if you want to argue that someone or some organization needs to be denied that freedom of association.
  • adzzzz 6y ago
    Yes they are entitled and we are allowed to disagree with it. That's the point everyone is trying to make. These legalistic arguments are silly and distracting.
    • coldpie 6y ago
      Apparently Twitch's employees like these policies for ethical reasons, and/or their businesspeople and advertisers think these policies will bring in more money. Personally, I like these policies and I'd like to see more of this kind of proactive action. I like Twitch more knowing that they have this policy. It shows that they understand their role in shaping public discourse and are taking responsibility for it. It's a difficult balancing act, and there's plenty of ways it could be done badly, but pretending that platforms and their algorithms don't play a role in public discourse is silly. I do feel most of this whole issue could be sidestepped with some long overdue antitrust enforcement.
      • adzzzz 6y ago
        >and/or their businesspeople and advertisers think these policies will bring in more money Yes this is the reason. They will continue to stifle speech so its more palatable for corporations to run ads on their platform. Censoring art and dissent is working well for the people you agree with right now. 60 years ago the current culture would have been unfathomable. In 60 years it may be unfathomable to you again, but now you've taken the stand that it's right and just that they stifle dissent. Hope that never bites you.
• Alupis 6y ago
  We may be arriving at a time and place where we must consider broadening the scope of the First Amendment to not just apply to government. I'm fully aware there's good reason for organizations and companies to limit free speech, but it often (lately) has gone way too far, dabbling in political witch hunting. I can think of few things less inline with classical American Constitutional ideals than to cheer on organizations that hunt down individuals and silence them for thoughts expressed on other platforms.
  • Judgmentality 6y ago
    > I can think of fewer things less inline with classical American Constitutional ideals than to cheer on organizations that hunt down individuals and silence them for thoughts expressed on other platforms. The moderation team of twitch is pretty much universally hated by the internet. I don't think anybody is cheering them on.
    • Alupis 6y ago
      Twitch is just the latest organization to jump onto the political silence bandwagon.
      • Jonnax 6y ago
        Personally I find it hilarious that American conservatives who have for decades been advocates of silencing people for things like being against wars, sex/violence in music/film/video games, and homosexuality, are now campaigning on being victims of the "cancel culture" they themselves have advocated for.
        • Alupis 6y ago
          I wonder if you're confusing public debate and a vocal minority with actual bans of things? I'm not aware of any actually banned video games in the US, for instance. We should talk about those things in public - and not everyone will agree. That's how it's supposed to be. It's brand new, however, to wield the power to literally cut off your political enemies from more than half of the population with a single click of the mouse.
• tw04 6y ago
  So you want the government to force private companies to continue doing business with someone they no longer wish to provide services to? We aren't talking protected class here, we're talking private companies picking and choosing who to do business with via non-discriminatory means. That's called a free market. Will they be restored if they're proven innocent? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, that's called a free market.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    I'm getting to the point where yes, I want to force these "private" companies to uphold civil liberties and principles such as innocent until proven guilty. I care way more about citizen freedom and expression than the concept of a "free market" which is a platonic ideal that has never existed and never will.
    • tw04 6y ago
      Sure it exists, but you need collective bargaining for it to be a level playing field. Content creators want to fight back against Twitch? Form a union.
      • morelisp 6y ago
        This is the correct, and only viable, solution. https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties. Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.
• Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  >but it may also investigate cases proactively Translation: We're going to ban whoever the ADL and SPLC point the finger at.
• Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  We've always been there. We lock people up pre-trial, sometimes for months if they cannot pay. People lose jobs and have trouble caring for children and so much more while this happens. You can lose a job if you get arrested. This happens before trial. We (Americans) don't really regulate the folks that do criminal background checks, so that arrest can cost you later too. Civil forfeiture is legal. Though some places have reined it in, not everywhere requires a guilty verdict in a criminal trial to take your stuff. And as a "bonus", the standards for proof are lower in civil proceedings than they are for criminal ones. In many areas, you can get fired for any reason, so all it takes is a boss that suspects you of something. Even if they cannot prove it, they can site loss of trust.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    What's so unfortunate to me is that I thought we were moving away from that. Just 4 years ago, my state passed a law prohibiting employers from hiring or firing based on arrests which didn't lead to a conviction. It's confusing and terribly disheartening to discover that many of the same people who pushed for that bill have no interest in the underlying principles of due process.
• nonameiguess 6y ago
  We haven't arrived anywhere. We were already here. Personally, I'd like to see less rather than more of this type of thing, but studios, sports leagues, and sometimes legislative bodies have long had traditions of removing celebrities from their umbrella for misconduct and various morality clauses even if they are never convicted of a crime. Twitch streamers are just another form of celebrity and subject to the same dynamics.
• benja123 6y ago
  There will be false positives too and then the big question is will there be a proper appeal process or will users be forced to talk to a chat or email bot while trying to get unbanned. For some people this is their livelihood and they will hopefully take that into account.
• austincheney 6y ago
  As horrible as that sounds it doesn’t bother me. When I was very young I remember a story of a high school student who horribly tortured a cat and drove around with its mangled but still living body. The high school baseball coach kicked that student off the team even though the student wasn’t arrested. This wasn’t considered cancel culture then and it didn’t bother me then either.
• 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
  innocent until accused That concept has been going on for a while. Women who were sexually harassed or assaulted were ignored for so long, we over corrected and we became cautious of just being accused. And now you get stories of male investors not engaging with female founders or execs who won’t meet with women without the presence of a trusted woman in the room. Cancel culture is more of the same. Let’s dig up tweets people made years ago and call them out. As though people don’t learn or absorb new ideas as they age and change their behaviour accordingly. We’re more interested in making sure we catch everyone that is guilty and some innocent people are acceptable casualties. In fact, let’s widen the net slightly for more by-catch. Then we know for sure we got everything.
• kvia 6y ago
  You'll be less confused if you stop conflating government and private business.
• otterley 6y ago
  The reason we have a high standard for criminal convictions is that your liberty or life can be taken away by the state, and the cost of a mistake is therefore high. Here we are talking about... the inability to show yourself playing video games to others.
  • hallway_monitor 6y ago
    I laughed a little when I saw the phrase "esports career". How decadent a society we have when people can make a living from other people watching them play games. No sillier than professional sports but still both are ridiculous IMO
• cl0ckt0wer 6y ago
  It's a website, not a court of law
• choppaface 6y ago
  The lack of the internet is the original cancel culture. Before the internet, it was easy for speech to get confined to some small region due to financial status, ethnicity, etc. The internet fundamentally counter-acts cancel culture. However, the “right to free speech” does NOT imply a right to be heard. Internet entities can and will do stupid things that interfere with individual expression, but they don’t trample upon individual rights. If literally nobody wants to hear a message, that doesn’t preclude one from expressing it to one’s self.
  • refenestrator 6y ago
    You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Now that access to large broadcast mediums is the norm, it's absolutely a blow to free speech to selectively censor some of it. Maybe we choose to make tradeoffs, but let's do so with our eyes open.
    • choppaface 6y ago
      Thanks to the internet, our eyes are more open than ever before. To the point of information overload. No amount of stupid can ever “put the toothpaste back in the tube.” If some speaker gets filtered from broadcast media, perhaps that speaker might rethink their message. Original cancel culture was even more restrictive—- it silenced voices due to the color of the speaker’s skin. It has always been a competitive endeavor to be heard. The internet might not be much of a fairer place for that game, but the potential reach is what makes the game worth it (or not, in some cases). If you think broadcast media gets it wrong, push back. But if you call it cancel culture, it’s easy to show what we see today is much less harmful than what came before.
  • john_moscow 6y ago
    If nobody wanted to hear a message, they would just not subscribe to a person sending it. We are not talking about that, we are talking about privately owned platforms directly deciding what kind of ideas are allowed to circulate in our society. And I find it quite worrying. Because right now it is in their direct interest to make sure an average American doesn't have a family, doesn't have kids, devotes their entire energy to their corporate job, and doesn't accumulate a single dollar worth of savings. It looks great on the financial statements, but it makes people across the board miserable.
• madeofpalk 6y ago
  I’m really not sure what you’re saying. Are you suggesting websites shouldn’t be able to moderate itself?