Trigger Warning: This post is about child abduction and sexual abuse.
As early as September 2022, it became known that the popular streaming platform Twitch was being used by child predators to track down and, in some cases, manipulate young streamers. Not long after the 2022 Bloomberg reportPull out announced changes to combat the problemby introducing phone verification requirements and claiming that it would work to delete accounts created by people under 13. But a new Bloomberg report published on January 5th of this year shows that the predator problem has not gone away but has changed, as perpetrators use a new, nefarious method to exploit children: abusing the Twitch “Clips” feature, which has reportedly been used for Recording and recording videos is used to share sexually explicit videos of minors.
Twitch clips are exactly what they sound like: 20-second snippets of a live stream that any viewer can record and share on social media. The feature was introduced in 2016 and so is Twitch I plan to expand it this year by creating a discovery feed for easy insights – all in an effort to compete with short-video platform TikTok. Unfortunately, it is these short videos that have reportedly enabled child molesters to spread the sexualization of minors online.
Bloombergcombined with The Canadian Center for Child Protection, analyzed nearly 1,100 clips and came to some shocking results. At least 83 or 7.5 percent of these short videos contained sexualized content about children. The analysis found that 34 of the 83 Twitch clips (about 41 percent) featured mostly young boys between the ages of 5 and 12 reportedly “exposing genitals to the camera” at the viewer’s encouragement. The other 49 videos (approximately 59 percent) contained sexualized content of minors either exposing other body parts or being subjected to grooming.
What makes the situation worse is not only the continued prevalence of child sexual abuse on Twitch, but also the frequency with which these clips were viewed. Accordingly BloombergAccording to the results, the 34 videos were viewed 2,700 times, while the other 49 clips were viewed around 7,300 times. The problem lies not only in the ease of creating these clips, but also in distributing them. According to Stephen Sauer, director of the Canadian Center for Child Protection, social media platforms can no longer be relied upon to regulate themselves.
“We have been watching the industry implement voluntary regulation for 25 years. We know it just doesn’t work,” Sauer said Bloomberg. “We see that far too many children are being exploited on these platforms. And we want the government to step in and say, ‘These are the safeguards you need to take.'”
In an email to My city, Twitch sent out a long, bulleted list of its plan to combat child predators on the platform. Here is the full list:
- Harm to youth anywhere online is unacceptable and we take this issue extremely seriously. We have invested heavily in enforcement tools and preventative measures and will continue to do so.
- All Twitch live streams undergo rigorous, proactive and automated review – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – in addition to ongoing enforcement by our security teams. This means that when we disable a live stream that contains harmful content and block the channel because clips are created from live streams, we prevent the creation and distribution of harmful clips at the source.
- Importantly, we have also worked to ensure that when we delete and disable clips that violate our Community Guidelines, those clips are not available via public domains or other direct links.
- Our teams are actively focused on preventing grooming and other predatory behavior on Twitch and preventing users under 13 from even creating an account. This work is of great importance to us and an area in which we will continue to invest heavily. Last year alone:
- We have developed additional models that detect potential brushing behavior.
- We’ve updated the tools we use to identify and remove suspended users who attempt to create new accounts, including those suspended for violating our parental safety policies.
- We’ve developed a new detection model to more quickly identify broadcasters who may be under 13, building on our other youth safety tools and interventions.
- We also recognize that online harm is unfortunately evolving. We’ve improved the policies our internal security teams use to identify some of these evolving online harms, such as generative AI-powered child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
- More broadly, we continue to strengthen ours parental resourcesand have worked with expert organizations such as ConnectSafely, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people about online safety, privacy, security and digital well-being additional instructions.
- As with all other online services, we will continue to diligently combat this issue. A meaningful fight against child abuse requires cooperation from all sides. We will continue to work with other industry organizations such as NCMEC, ICMEC and Thorn to combat online youth exploitation.
This is what Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, said Bloomberg that while the company has made “significant progress” in combating child abuse, tackling the problem requires collaboration with various authorities.
“Youth violations all over the internet are deeply disturbing,” Clancy said. “Even one case is too many and we take this issue extremely seriously. As with all other online services, this issue is one that we will continue to diligently combat.”
