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Twitch Announce New Tool To Help Reduce Harassment And Abuse

It’s fantastic to see Twitch continuing their awesome work in enhancing their users’ experience. We will continue to highlight their great work in the future!

Leading video game streaming platform Twitch has introduced a new tool to reduce online abuse. With around two million gamers broadcasting every month and millions more tuning in to watch, Twitch – who also stream live gaming events from all over the world, are taking a firm stance against racism, misogyny and hate speech on their platform.

Anna Prosser, Inclusivity Group Lead at Twitch comments “Inclusivity is something that is important to both our community and our brand. One of the best ways we can help bring about change is to provide tools and education that empower all types of voices to be heard”.

The new tool is an artificially intelligent program that filters out potentially offensive words and phrases, and then diverts them for moderation before they appear on the site. This new feature is called the AutoMod and can be turned on by streamers to help them deal with abusive comments more easily. This latest move enhances the tools already available to streamers, giving them more options in how they manage viewers comments.

“By combining the power of humans and machine learning, AutoMod takes things a step further. For the first time ever, we’re empowering all of our creators to establish a reliable baseline for acceptable language and around the clock chat moderation.”

Ryan Kennedy, Moderator Lead, Twitch

With gaming and esports becoming more mainstream, the problem of abusive language has been high on the agenda for esports event organizers and game streaming platforms. Earlier this year Twitch teamed up with games developer Blizzard in an effort to combat online abuse following an incident during a live event stream where a female gamer was racially abused. This latest development is a clear sign that Twitch are not just talking a good fight and that they are committed to stamping out abuse and hate speech in esports.

“This is an exciting and promising development from one of the gaming industries leading platforms. Alongside recent incentives from Riot Games, Blizzard and Intel, we are seeing how collective action in the gaming and tech industries is staring to make a real difference.”

Dan Raisbeck, Co Founder, The Cybersmile Foundation

If you are being affected by online negativity check out our gaming abuse support center or visit our total access support section to see the different ways we can give you help for cyberbullying or abuse in gaming. For further information about Cybersmile and the work we do, please explore the following suggestions.

We are seriously impressed with Twitch, what are your thoughts? Tweet us @CybersmileHQ.