On December 13, Twitch announced that it would shift its Community Guidelines to permit “artistic nudity” on its platform. That policy lasted about two days.
By December 15, Twitch was overrun with pornographic content, and its CEO was left with no choice other than a full rollback. “Much of the content created has been met with community concern,” Dan Clancy wrote in a policy update. “These are concerns we share. Upon reflection, we have decided that we went too far with this change.”
Twitch’s original decision to relax its guidelines served as a response to the platform’s “topless meta,” in which creators like iShowSpeed and Morgpie (pictured above) pushed the limit of Twitch’s nudity policy. After addressing the topless meta, Twitch moved to permit “artistic nudity” despite some concerns about the logic behind that change.
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Those concerns soon proved to be well-founded. Creators like sensitive soci3ty remarked on the instant transformation of Twitch’s Art category, which was filled with “human nudity, fox nudity, alien nudity, furry nudity” and other pornographic images that used the term “artistic nudity” in a liberal fashion. “I don’t know why they didn’t see that coming. That was always going to be the outcome of a policy like this,” said Charlie ‘Moist Cr1TiKaL’ White in a YouTube response. “It just seems like they don’t exactly know their community that well.”
By rolling back its nudity policy, Twitch will look to root out the “universe of porn” it enabled on its platform. There’s a clear lesson to be learned here: Twitch will probably be better off if it leaves the “artistic nudity” to OnlyFans.
