Update, 12/15/23: Just two days after changing its policy, Twitch has rescinded the rule allowing "artistic" depictions of nudity. This follows a notable uptick in explicit imagery in Twitch's art section -- not all of it in good faith -- as well as, according to Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, AI images that verged on "realistic." Ultimately, Twitch decided to roll back the change in light of "community concern." Streamers have since pointed out that YouTube has allowed artistic nudity for a decade, seemingly without losing out on significant ad revenue, while others have suggested that Twitch should've waited out the initial tidal wave of rule abusers instead of capitulating to pressure. For now, though, Twitch has given up on its artistic nudity experiment. Those goalposts sure did move quickly.
Original article: Today Twitch announced an update to its sexual content policy that allows streams that highlight specific body parts, feature artistic (read: drawn/painted) depictions of nudity, or include dances that involve disrobing, like strip teases – as long as they carry an appropriate content classification label. The update will automatically remove these kinds of streams from Twitch’s front page recommendations and, should viewers seek them out anyway, warn viewers of what they’re about to see before they see it.
Twitch users have been asking for something like this for years. Some big-name streamers like Asmongold, CohhCarnage, and Kaceytron are calling this a rare Twitch W, while streamers who’ve previously gotten suspended for even drawing characters in swimsuits are relieved. However, the usual suspects – people who love to get mad online in the name of protecting imaginary children – are still upset.
These changes follow a week-long saga surrounding a new “topless” meta in which streamers position their camera so that it’s just above any ban-worthy danger zones and talk to their chats. Dexerto, a drama farm masquerading as a publication, published a clip of a male streamer reacting to a Twitch creator named Morgpie, who has since become the meta’s face, with the caption “What is going on at Twitch?” It garnered over 70 million views according to Twitter’s assuredly inflated statistics and attracted comments from the exact kind of person you’d expect it to attract comments from. One declares the meta “easy mode” despite the fact that as of 2021 just three percent of Twitch’s top earning streamers were women. “Twitch should be charged for indecent exposure and endangerment of children as well as every streamer personally that is on there doing this,” reads another response. “Twitch went from gaming to soft core porn in a couple years,” reads a response that has over 24,000 likes. And so on and so on.
Except that this is not the least bit new. As politics streamer Michael “Mike from PA” Beyer put it: “Twitch has allowed body paint with pasties for years; this is far less revealing. Who cares? Stop taking incel Twitter bait.” Outrage at the topless meta echoes outrage at 2021’s hot tub meta – in which streamers, you guessed it, streamed from hot tubs – which also forced a rule change out of Twitch. It echoes numerous panics around “titty streamers,” who committed the unforgivable crime of wearing low-cut tops, which had inflection points in 2018, 2017, and 2016, but which go back as far as Twitch’s earliest days.
And if we want to get really historical about it, we can also point to the fact that sex workers – which some streamers benefitting from the topless meta are, while some are not – pioneered many of the business models content creators rely on today, not to mention the entire concept of e-commerce.
"The porn and adult entertainment industries, and the women whose work built them, were one of the earliest to provide real-time credit card verification, establishing a precedent for models of e-commerce other industries would adopt later on,” wrote Vice’s Sofia Barrett-Ibarria in a piece titled “Sex Workers Pioneered the Early Internet – and It Screwed Them Over.” “Sex workers and porn performers essentially created, adopted, and inspired many of the technologies later co-opted by tech corporations and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs long before they reached the mainstream, and continue to do so."
If we go even further back, all the way to 1996, you could make the argument that livestreaming itself was pioneered by a woman, Jennifer Ringley, who incorporated sex and masturbation into a project in which she “lifecasted” everything that happened in her college dorm room via a webcam that would snap shots every few minutes. Ringley is considered the first cam girl and, by some, the first person to do anything like this at all, at least in a way that garnered a significant following.
Sexual content, in other words, has always been intertwined with livestreaming. But that’s not the point of much of the pushback against the topless meta or the many that came before. It never was. For more than a decade, Twitch has functioned as a flashpoint – one of many – for pervasive societal discomfort at the idea of women making money off their bodies and appearances. That’s why we get the same panic over and over about more or less the same thing. Shockingly, the moral fiber of our society does not corrode into dust; it remains pretty much the same as it ever was. If these circular arguments stopped happening like clockwork, that would be evidence of change.
This time, at least, Twitch is enacting a structural alteration that seems designed to placate semi-good faith criticisms of risque streams: that they were sometimes appearing alongside more family friendly content on Twitch’s front page. Now these broadcasts can occupy their own spaces, and streamers – at least, ideally – no longer have to worry about inconsistent applications of the big bad banhammer, which even Twitch admitted in today’s announcement were “out of line with industry standards and resulted in female-presenting streamers being disproportionately penalized.” In theory, everybody wins: Streamers can do what they want within limits, and dudes who love to be mad online (and the children they claim to defend) don’t have to see it.
And yet, wouldn’t you know it, the goalposts keep moving. Today, “artistic nudity” trended on Twitter, with many incredulously asking what it was and lamenting the state of Twitch. Never mind that Twitch’s post spells out exactly what it is: “fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) sexual body parts regardless of gender (such as doing nude figure drawing).” Again, that’s not the point. That’s never been the point. And of course, the “think of the children” crowd has continued to lament that young people will go on Twitch and immediately see porn, despite the fact that 1) They won’t, as a direct result of this policy, and 2) Twitch says in gigantic letters on its own advertising page that more than 70 percent of Twitch viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34 – meaning that Twitch is largely made up of adults, not kids.
Hopefully, these people will have less to complain about after today’s long-overdue changes have been in effect for a while, but I sincerely doubt it. We’ll be back here again for the thousandth flavor of the same moral panic in six months or a year or two years, because that, lamentably, is just how all of this works. In the meantime – not that it matters, because, once more for those in back, it was never the point – Morgpie, the topless meta’s main character, says she was wearing a top the whole time.
