Twitch updates its community guidelines to ban ‘misinformation superspreaders’

Twitch has updated its Spam, Scams and Malicious Conduct Policy to prohibit what the company is calling “harmful misinformation actors.” As defined by the company, these are “misinformation superspreaders” that match a very specific criteria to combat false and disproven statements about COVID-19, Fraud in elections, misinformation that supports violence and other such things are some of the many examples.

Three characteristics are required for channels to get the axe:

Together, we’ve identified three characteristics that all of these actors share: their online presence – whether on or off Twitch – is dedicated to (1) persistently sharing (2) widely disproven and broadly shared (3) harmful misinformation topics, such as conspiracies that promote violence. We’ve selected these criteria because taken together they create the highest risk of harm including inciting real world harm. Only actors that meet these three criteria will be prosecuted. Our Off-Service Investigations team will review each case thoroughly.

Given this language, it’s questionable how effective this policy will be in removing anything other than explicitly labeled propaganda outlets, such as channels controlled by the Russian state media. (Twitch frames this policy change as pre-emptive, and its blog post on the new policy doesn’t mention any shuttered channels, instead assuring readers that “this update will likely not impact you or the streamers you love on Twitch.”)

The problem with disinformation, however is its inability to be sourced from reliable sources. There are no’You can find it here expressly titled Propaganda News Now; it comes from influencers with wide fanbases talking about other things — a class of Twitch users explicitly protected by the policy’s statement that “it will not be applied to users based upon individual statements or discussions that occur on the channel.”