Twitch has banned one of its partnered streamers, ShyBear, for creating an unfinished nude portrait during one of her art streams. Twitch has a history of abruptly banning streamers for questionable reasons, such as the recent ban on Viperous for saying “nerd” on stream.
Twitch’s terms-of-service agreement includes a broad and lengthy list of prohibited conduct for users. On its face, this list is meant to curb “inaccurate, unlawful, infringing, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, invasive, harassing, threatening, abusive, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable” behavior. However, the way that Twitch enforces these terms often results in disproportionate punishments for otherwise innocent streamers. Despite a former Twitch employee saying that Twitch does not automatically ban users, many streamers have disputed that claim and criticized the service for its abrupt and frequent bans – among other things.
Now another Twitch user has been suddenly suspended for debatable reasons. According to a recent tweet from streamer and artist ShyBear, she received a three-day ban due to an unfinished nude portrait that was created during one of her streams. In the tweet, ShyBear included a photo of the painting, asking Twitch to “rethink how you guys do bans and ban people who actually deserve it.” The painting shows a nude woman from the back, but ShyBear points out that “you are allowed to do nude portraits without nipples… mine had no nipples. It barely had anything on it yet.“
Others on Twitter have suggested that one possible reason for the ban could be the fact that the stream was titled “live nude painting auction”. Regardless, ShyBear was describing “the painting, not myself” in the title, and there was nothing in the stream that violated Twitch’s code of conduct. Twitch has been unresponsive to questionable bans before, and the company has not responded to complaints about this one either.
Twitch seems to be on shaky ground lately, both from a business perspective and a community perspective. Twitch missed its 2019 ad revenue goal by millions of dollars, despite the changes made to the way ads work on the site. Twitch also spent millions to stop popular streamers from leaving for other platforms. As actions like this make its platform gets less and less appealing to smaller streamers, the competition from Mixer and YouTube only grows. Twitch made need to make some serious changes soon if it wants to maintain its market share.
