Twitch has continued to receive criticism from its userbase, including both its streamers and viewers, for uneven and often irrational moderation practices. Some Twitch streamers will be banned for small offenses while others who seemingly commit much more serious infractions receive no punishment whatsoever. The company has apparently decided to address these concerns, with CEO Emmett Shear speaking about it at this year's TwitchCon.
To Shear's credit, he opens up his statement by acknowledging that Twitch makes mistakes with regards to its moderation practices. It goes a bit awry from there, with Shear saying somewhat dismissively that "any team making thousands of decisions a day will make mistakes." Shear goes on to say that, outside of mistakes, there are situations where it seems like Twitch punishes one channel and forgives another for the same issue. To this, Shear says that it's a matter of context and intent.
"When we're applying the community guidelines, we very specifically take context and intent into account" is how Shear describes Twitch's moderation practices. He goes on to describe a scenario in which someone walking down the street could either be shoved intentionally or pushed by someone who has been tripped. "To an outsider looking at a video of that accident, it looks the same. But it's not the same. Your intent matters."
Two recent incidents have been a particular focus for the Twitch community. In each, Twitch decided not to ban channels that had done something ban-worthy in the community's eyes. There's when Alinity threw her cat over her head after it had stepped on her keyboard while she was playing a game and when when Tfue said a racial slur while in a heated moment playing Minecraft. Both of these situations could fit Shear's description of whether either streamer "intended" to cause harm. However, both serve as examples where intent doesn't so much matter as the product of their actions to many.
The Twitch community is very unlikely to be happy with Shear's comments. He acknowledges mistakes have been made, but then dismissively suggests they're all handled through Twitch's appeals process. He states intent and context matters more than a streamer's actions, but this only seems to be Twitch's policy for popular partnered streamers. For smaller channels, actions speak louder than intent . For example, Nysttren was banned for visiting an artist request thread on 4chan, despite no content that would break the community guidelines being shown.
In the community's eyes, Twitch still has a significant amount of work to do in order to get its moderation practices in line. Shear's comments, however, seem to indicate that Twitch has no intent to change despite community frustrations.