Twitch Gets Trigger-Happy with PS4 Ban Notices after Sexual Assault Gets Streamed Live
Come on, guys. This is why we can't have nice things.
It’s an old adage of the Internet that if you stream it, they will come — and put their dicks on it. Apparently, nobody at Sony or Twitch had heard that adage before, as they didn’t put a whole lot of measures in place to make sure nobody did that with their integrated streaming. Now they’re going on a user-banning rampage to make up for lost time.
According to Guyism, a PS4 user named “Darckobra12” and his wife were participating in a live streaming hangout in the PS4 PlayRoom channel on Saturday. When she passed out on camera, he totally respected his fellow human being and life partner’s inability to consent and — nah I’m just kidding, this is the Internet we’re talking about and people are the absolute freaking worst! He started taking her clothes off. His account was banned shortly after.
Seemingly in the wake of this user’s actions (not that he’s the only person trying to put nudity onto a livestream, of course — he’s just the absolute worst of ’em), Twitch has doubled-down on their terms of service. Yesterday, they reminded users about their clause against “non-gaming content” on Twitter, probably because “violating your wife’s privacy and trust by committing sexual assault against her on camera” would take too many characters.
FYI: We continue to moderate according to our Terms of Service. Non-gaming content is not allowed. 1/2
— Twitch Support (@TwitchTVSupport) November 24, 2013
Non-gaming content (c): If using PS4 Playroom, the content must be about games or gaming and within our ToS. Thanks for understanding. 2/2
— Twitch Support (@TwitchTVSupport) November 24, 2013
What’s been happening, however, is that Twitch has apparently been banning users who are streaming perfectly normal gaming content because of the comments in their chatrooms, not because of what they’re actually putting on camera. One Reddit user, Beethy, seems to think that a stream of he and his family playing games was taken out because of an inappropriate comment one watcher made about Beethy’s wife. Hey, Internet, stop being such jerks to wives!
This isn’t really a new problem, of course. Twitch has been dealing with abuses against their Terms of Service for years. However, this is the first time that Twitch has ever been synced up with a third party app that’s maintained by someone else — namely, Sony — which makes the problem of monitoring every stream that much more important and that much more difficult. So, it’s no wonder that they’re going a little nuts with the ban button right now. There’s no word yet on what this re-adherence to “gaming-only content” will have on the more lighthearted non-gaming streams like The Sparton Show, but it probably won’t be good.
Also, it seems as though there’s no way to follow up on what happened to the poor woman who’s married to “Darckobra12,” which is upsetting. Like yes, boo, it’s so lame that Twitch is banning users, whatever — but seriously. A drunk, unconscious woman getting stripped naked on a couch? That sounds like the beginning to a Law and Order: SVU episode. We are very concerned, and somebody should probably press charges.
(via Kotaku and CVG, image via Sony)
- It’s too bad, because The Spartan Show is pretty great
- Sony wants to send a bunch of celebrities into space
- Here, learn yourself some facts about the original Playstation
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