After a day of silence, the CEO of livestreaming website Twitch has apologised for the poor handling of a recent controversy involving staff members, emoticons, and a number of people from the streaming community.
“We’d like to repair the damage that has been done to the relationship between Twitch and the Speedrunning community,” Emmett Shear, CEO and co-founder of Twitch, wrote on Reddit today.
He’s referring to a recent debacle where a staff member called ‘Horror’ uploaded an emoticon to Twitch. Some Twitch users (in particular, some speedrunners), Redditors and neoGAFfers allege that it was an emoticon that depicted the ‘Fursona‘ of Horror’s boyfriend. While Twitch does not acknowledge this outright — they call the emoticon’s existence a “personal favour” — based on threads around the web and a number of emails sent to Kotaku, it’s clear that the community perceived nepotism from Twitch staff. Normally, this isn’t the way emoticons are added to Twitch.
Horror then went on to remove a number of emoticons from Twitch on the grounds that Twitch does not allow copyrighted images — except that at least one of these emoticons was under Creative Commons, and was therefore available for use. This oversight, in conjunction with the other emoticon-related favour, resulted in a number of unhappy users who thought the way staff was acting wasn’t quite fair.
Backlash ensued. Some members of the community merely discussed recent happenings, while others titled their streams with demands that Horror step down (“Remove Horror” is the phrase most cited in emails sent to Kotaku). Some users took to harassing Horror and other staff members from Twitch. And naturally, some folks were banned as a result of these activities — but even Twitch acknowledges that it went too far (you can see a partial list of the people who were banned here — some of these folks rely on Twitch for a source of income). It doesn’t help that a volunteer Twitch admin even asked Reddit admins to censor discussion of this controversy on Reddit (though to be clear, this wasn’t something that Twitch asked this admin to do).
“Harassment and/or defamation of any user on the site, including a staff member, is clearly against the Twitch terms of service,” Shear wrote on Reddit. “Some of the banned user’s remarks clearly cross this line, and those users were correctly banned. Other users made more innocuous remarks and should not have been banned. Horror was too close to this situation and should have recused himself in favour of less conflicted moderators. Being personally involved led to very poor decisions being made.”
“The NightLight emoticon should not have been approved as a global emoticon and has been removed by request of the channel owner,” Shear said.
Shear also outlined a number of things that Twitch hopes to do moving forward as a result of this controversy:
- Twitch users who were unfairly banned due to this incident are being systematically unbanned today.
- The Twitch partners who were banned due to this incident have been provisionally unbanned pending investigation.
- The NightLight emoticon has been removed.
- Disciplinary action is being taken with regard to Twitch staff and members of the volunteer admin team who overstepped their authority.
- Due to this incident, we are embarking on a full review of Twitch admin policies and community moderation procedures.
- Horror has voluntarily stepped back from public facing moderation work at Twitch, as right now pretty much every moderation issue will be tainted by this episode.
You can read the apology in full here.
Picture: Wikimedia
Comments
10 responses to “Twitch Apologises Over Recent Abuse Of Power By Staff”
That escalated from nothing to something quickly.
Really?
REALLY?
All this over freaking emoticons?!? WTF is wrong with people. Are their lives that empty that the existence of emoticons is the most pressing issue in their lives?
It’s not over an Emoticon dude. It’s about a person in power (the admin) giving their personal friends privileges because of association.
Yeah but put it into perspective. It’s a videogame stream website and someone got an emoticon. It’s hardly a government giving out contracts to friends. The amount of rage over it is insane.
The point is, if you ignore it because it’s “just an emoticon”. It will get worse and worse. Next admin would be banning people because someone said something nasty about their friends stream. Got to nip it in the butt straight away. Like with the Xbox One. If people didn’t say anything immediately. What would be happening now? You will find that freedoms or rights never disappear over night, they get chipped at for years, and then they are all gone.
It is just an emoticon. Lets not blow it out of proportion like the anonymous mob mentality has. IF Twitch has acted in a way that is inappropriate then stop engaging in their services. You are not ENTITLED to demand changes from Twitch. You engage in their services and they want you to continue so they continue to try and provide good service.
Abuse of power by admins? Time to leave their services. If it really is a problem, then just leave. There is no ‘freedoms’ or ‘rights’ that are being infringed upon. These are imaginary because almost all of these ‘movements’ come from a bloated sense of over-entitlement.
And then someone making a innocent joke about said abuse of power and getting banned for it.
Have you seen Twitch chats? They make Youtube look intelligent.
I saw a good chunk of this unfold and simply went to other streams. Online drama is fun.
That sounds far less exciting than the version of events retold to me by a friend.
People who seriously believe they are anthropomorphic cartoon animals arguing over emoticons. What a load of frivolous drivel.
And Horror, looking just now at his Twitter account, has taken shots at Reddit again. Is he an idiot? How does he still have a job?