Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Twitch is cracking down on accounts belonging to users under the age of 13 as part of its efforts to protect children on the platform. In a post on Twitch’s safety center, the Amazon-owned company announced that it’s improving its methods for detecting and terminating the accounts belonging to young users and is also working on ways to block users who were previously suspended for being under 13.
These changes come after a report from Bloomberg revealed rampant child predation on the platform. The report, first published in September, analyzed 1,976 accounts on Twitch with follower lists made up of 70 percent or more users who are kids or young teenagers. According to Bloomberg, a total of 279,016 children were targeted by these alleged predators on Twitch.
In addition to “expanding the signals” it uses to catch and block users under the age of 13, Twitch is going to introduce mandatory phone verification requirements to “potentially vulnerable accounts” before they can start livestreaming. While Twitch doesn’t expand on how it will identify these accounts, it says this should help the platform prevent young users who lie about their age from becoming exposed to child predators during livestreams.
Twitch is also updating its moderation policies to prioritize reports involving users under the age of 13. It has changed the default setting for its direct messaging feature, called Whispers, as well and blocked the ability to conduct searches on Twitch using “certain search terms or phrases.” Again, Twitch doesn’t offer much detail as to what setting it has updated and which terms it has banned. However, upon creating a new account on Twitch, The Verge found that the “block Whispers from strangers” setting is now turned on by default. Twitch declined to comment on the record.
“These updates are by no means exhaustive, nor are they an endpoint for our efforts,” Twitch writes in the post. “Much of what we’ve been doing, as well as much of what we have planned, must remain private to be effective.”
Twitch says it’s working with outside organizations to keep track of wider child grooming trends so it can better monitor and combat predators, but today’s announcement doesn’t offer any additional details as to how it plans on keeping these bad actors off the platform. Its last update from September said that it has an “off-service policy” in place that lets Twitch remove users from the platform based on behaviors that take place outside of Twitch.
At the time, Twitch added that it’s deploying “automated measures identify, report, and prevent potential predators from being able to cause harm” but said it can’t expand on the details of this initiative “in order for it to maintain efficacy.” The platform also already has a policy in place to report illegal content and activity to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.