Twitch offers slightly more information about suspensions

Twitch has announced that it will offer slightly more detail to users when it hands down suspensions for violating its content rules. As The Verge notes, the Amazon-owned platform can still be frustratingly vague when justifying why a users account has been suspended. The new update will see users informed of the name of the offending stream, the date that it aired, and the rule that it broke, but nothing more.

Opaque moderation has been a problem for Twitch before, and as we reported last year, the site still has a problem with context. In 2020, the platform suspended a professional Valorant player when their young child appeared on the stream while the player was answering the door. There are common-sense reasons to ban minors from streaming, but this was clearly an accident rather than intentional.

A similar incident took place when Twitch, without warning, suddenly demonetized a number of high-profile accounts during the Hot Tub Meta. At the time, it said that it should have “alerted affected streamers to this change before it happened — it was a mistake not to do so.” As we wrote in 2020 the site needs to make much more of an effort to explain why it’s doing what it’s doing or else see the relationship with its community deteriorate even further.