As platform moderation standards vary, creators eye Twitch as a safe haven 

“I feel safer on Twitch than I do on other platforms,” Birdsong said. 

Birdsong is not the only creator who has increased his focus on Twitch as a result of the platform’s approach to moderation. As rival platforms such as Kick develop reputations for relatively light content moderation, four creators told Digiday that they are choosing to prioritize activity on Twitch due to its improved trust and safety practices — particularly for their live video content.

“There’s value in other platforms like YouTube and TikTok for pre-recorded content,” said Gappy, a creator of color who asked to keep his real name private, “but it doesn’t feel as worthwhile livestreaming on other platforms when you can barely regulate your chat.”

Over the past year, creator platforms such as X and Facebook have explicitly deprioritized content moderation, with the former cutting the bulk of its moderation staff and the latter getting rid of its fact-checking team. On the other hand, Twitch expanded its moderator tools last month, including the introduction of a more user-friendly moderation settings page and the opening up of Twitch’s mobile moderation tools to Android users.

“The majority of our streamers, regardless of their orientation or however they identify, like the idea that there is tooling available to them — that they can set up their own space the way they feel comfortable doing it,” said Twitch vp of community health Sakina Arsiwala. “And those are the tools that result in this feeling of safety across the board, both for viewers, community members, as well as streamers.”

The majority of Twitch’s active streamers – a number that stands at roughly 7 million per month, according to the data platform TwitchTracker — are taking advantage of the platform’s moderation tools, per Twitch. Twitch’s safety settings include tools such as modes that limit creators’ live chats to their followers or subscribers and the ability to add a delay to chat messages, as well as the ability to filter key words from the chat.

At the moment, over 80 percent of Twitch channels use back-end tools such as Twitch’s Shield Mode to create pre-set safety settings — a significant increase from the 20 percent of channels that used moderation tools in 2022, per a Twitch representative. Over 80 percent of Twitch channels use the platform’s Automod, a tool that automatically isolates harmful chat messages for review. 

Twitch representatives stressed that their ongoing updates to the platform’s content moderation tools were the result of a years-long initiative to improve Twitch for creators, rather than a direct response to other platforms’ decisions to deprioritize moderation.

“It’s not a competitive thing,” Arsiwala said. “It’s just something we’ve always done, for several years now — and this is just a good time to build.”

Creators have not always seen Twitch as a safe space. As recently as last year, some creators vocally protested the platform’s perceived lack of moderation tools due to the prevalence of so-called “hate raids” on the platform, during which anonymous users — many of them bots — flooded streamers’ live chats with hateful or offensive messages.

“If you’d asked me a year ago, I would say ‘there are new moderation tools, but they kind of suck,’” said the Twitch streamer Blizzb3ar, who identifies as Black and queer and requested to keep his real name private to protect his personal information. “But now, they don’t, so it’s okay.”

In 2022, a group of Black creators issued an open letter requesting that the platform do more to protect minority streamers from the raids. Since then, Twitch has significantly expanded its moderation tools. Robert “Novanagi” Spencer, a signatory of the 2022 letter, believes the platform has sufficiently addressed his concerns.

“Ever since then, I have not gotten hate-raided, have not gotten follow-botted,” Spencer said. “I do get bots here and there, but thanks to the first-party and third-party [moderation] additions, they easily get taken out, so I don’t have to worry much about them.”

Creators’ approval notwithstanding, Twitch does not lean into its content moderation focus and the ensuing brand safety benefits when it pitches its advertising inventory to prospective brands, according to two media buyers with familiarity of Twitch ads who spoke to Digiday for this story. 

During a time in which marketers are less concerned than ever about creators’ potential brand safety issues, advertisers spending money on Twitch are more focused on the performance of their ads than the comfort of creators on the platform. 

“I don’t know if the clients themselves are at the point where they’re always recognizing that nuance of Twitch being supportive of creators,” said Max Bass, director of emerging connections at the agency Gale. “I think that they’re more looking at it from scale, specific audience, measurable advertising — you know, that type of vibe.”