Twitch: Finally a real measure against harassment?

Twitch users and streamers know: For the past few years, harassment has unfortunately been on the rise on Amazon’s platform. Taking advantage of the pseudo-anonymity that Twitch chat offers, many dishonest viewers keep harassing certain content creators. Thus, a simple live can turn into hell for streamers and in order to protect them as much as possible, the company has just set up a shield.

“Protect your channel with shield mode”

While it previously existed through the Streamdeck and other options, the shield has been completely reinvented by Twitch and now allows streamers to protect themselves even more. The real strength of this shield is that it combines several already existing protection tools such as blocking messages in chat or phone number/email verification. From now on, all these functionalities can be used in one click!

By choosing shield-on/shield-off from the channel page, Stream Manager or ModView; each streamer can thus easily activate or deactivate this shield in order to deal with the omnipresent harassment towards certain creators.

Great initiative from Twitch: the appearance of the “shield” mode on all chats.
Functionality that already existed before via a few shortcuts and configurable on Streamdeck, it is now possible with a single click to activate many protections in the event of sudden harassment. pic.twitter.com/oNmlVGFf3L

— DamDamLive (@DamDamOfficial) December 1, 2022

Two new features

In order to complete this shield, the Twitch teams have added two new tools:

• The banning of certain phrases/words in particular.

Streamers can access this feature in the tab “Terms and Expressions”, and anyone who uses these words will be automatically banned. Moderators can then review the list of people who used those phrases to unban them if it wasn’t necessary and the word used wasn’t harmful to the streamer or anyone else.

When enabled, this mode of the shield will allow streamers to ban first-time chat users from leaving a message there. What to avoid banned stalkers returning with new accounts on the channel of a creator / content creator.

“The security job is never done, and we’re working on more tools that make it easier to moderate your channel. As we move forward, we’re focusing more on features, like this, that are customizable and can be easily scaled up or down to reflect your needs at the time. We also work to stop damage before it happens.”

Twitch

(Source)

We strongly hope that this new system will serve to protect the streamers who will use it. Above all, that the harassers are more easily identifiable and that they can face real sanctions/legal proceedings.