Twitch’s top streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins recently announced that he would be toning down foul language on his streams and some reacted negatively, prompting his wife and manager Jessica “JGhosty” Goch to clarify the decision.
Ninja has of course rocketed to the top of Amazon owned streaming platform Twitch, partly due to the boom of battle royale game Fortnite as a streaming phenomenon, and the increased audience has led him to rethink his behavior while live.
While Ninja himself had already began to stop swearing so much on broadcast, he found himself struggling to enforce a potty mouth rule to some of his teammates – who of course include celebrities such as Lil Yachty, Drake and Travis Scott.
He has also apparently been critical of other streamers such as TSM’s Ali “Myth” Kabbani, for swearing profusely, basically because it will put some parents off allowing their kids to watch the content.
As such, Ninja has decided to introduce a ‘rating system’ where he will insert presumably an age rating in the title of the stream, so that kids and parents will know the level of language being used, and could choose to watch the stream muted.
One thing I am going to start doing is applying a “rated” (pg,pg13,R) in some YouTube videos and twitch stream titles depending on the content. I understand some celebs I play with might be a little more.. tasteful than others lol.
PS: going for 200k in total shirt sales 2night
— Ninja (@Ninja) May 8, 2018
Unfortunately, some fans criticized this move, suggesting that he was being ‘fake’ and trying to hard to appeal to a mainstream and younger audience.
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This prompted his wife and manager JGhosty to make a public statement clarifying the decision, and defending Ninja’s motives.
It's a change that I'm proud of him for. This is why he is implementing the rating system. He will still have some crazy nights and play with people who have quite the vocabulary…who cares! For the younger ears and eyes, they will have the rating and the parents will know.
— Jessica (@JGhosty) May 10, 2018
Twitch itself, unlike YouTube, does not penalize in any way for swearing on broadcast, likely because it would be way to difficult to enforce, and would receive massively negative responses.
However, with Ninja introducing his own manual rating system, Twitch themselves may be intrigued and considering adding it as a site wide application, perhaps one that streamers can opt in or out of.
With the boom to Twitch’s users (largely thanks also to Fortnite) there is undoubtedly a lot of younger people making accounts to watch their favorite Fortnite streamers or perhaps even stream themselves.