Twitch changes content rules to allow lewd live streams after complaints

Viewers and streamers have complained that rules on adult content have been inconsistently applied

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Live streaming website Twitch has changed its terms to allow streamers to include some adult content.

The live streaming website said the decision had come in response to “consistent feedback from streamers” that its “policies around sexual content are confusing”. It follows a number of high-profile incidents in which its rules appear to have been inconsistently applied.

The site recently banned a user for seemingly streaming while topless – even though they did not show most of their body – while another who showed pornographic videos stayed on the site, for instance.

Twitch also said that the old rules had led to “female-presenting streamers being disproportionately penalised”.

Now twitch says that it will let users include videos with “deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region”, it said. Streamers can also show “Fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender”, “Body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks” and “Erotic dances that involve disrobing or disrobing gestures, such as strip teases”.

Those videos must include a Content Classification Label, or CCL, a system that was introduced over summer. That label can be applied to videos with sexual themes as well as other potentially problematic content such as videos about gambling.

Twitch also said that it would now allow “Popular dances, such as twerking, grinding, and pole dancing” without such a label. It noted that it had previously allowed some dances and banned others – which meant that it would ban “twerking at a wedding or taking a pole dancing exercise class”, for example.

Many of Twitch’s rules about adult content stay in place. Streamers cannot show games that are devoted to “nudity, pornography, sex, or sexual violence as a core focus or feature”, for instance, and cannot show pornography.

There will also be changes made to what videos are shown on the homepage, to ensure that users do not see explicit or uncomfortable content without asking for it. Videos about issues such as drugs or gambling which not show on the homepage, for instance.