Streaming star Asmongold believes Twitch dropped a “nuke” on content creators by blurring sexual content and implementing new filtering options, but it still doesn’t solve the problem.
Back on May 21, Twitch announced a series of changes to how content would be presented on the site with select broadcasts being filtered due to sexual content, violence, vulgarity or even due to streamers playing Mature-rated games.
The filtering options also include burring thumbnails if a stream’s Content Classification Label includes sexual content and Asmongold was quite pleasantly surprised by these changes.
In a May broadcast shortly after the site’s updates went live, Asmongold noted how Twitch was in a “battle against which they cannot name.”
According to the OTK co-founder, one of the problems Twitch faces is creators using the platform to promote their adult content on other services and created these new rules to silently deal with it.
“This is going to be so big,” he said. “This is the reason why everybody thinks Twitch is an [adult content] site. It’s because people can go to Twitch and they get recommended all these streams.”
After checking out the filtering options for himself, the 34-year-old MMORPG veteran was in awe at how well they were working as many broadcasts in the ASMR and hot tubs sections had already been blurred.
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“Damn! Get filtered!” he exclaimed. “Oh my God, that was fast.”
Despite the initial praise, Asmongold still had some concerns that this was a bandaid solution that didn’t address the real problem.
“The reason Twitch can’t solve this problem is because Twitch refuses to acknowledge what it is. That there are women using your platform to sell [sexual content]. Twitch doesn’t want to acknowledge that because it looks like they’re trying to suppress women. Because it’s like, ‘oh, both genders do this.’ No, they don’t, it’s only women.
There are maybe two guys that do this and that’s it. And there are thousands of women. Men are the ones that are buying it. They’re creating the market. But you can’t say this, because it’s socially inconvenient,” he added.
Although Asmongold is critical of the filtering options, he has been supportive of other changes in the past, such as when Twitch decided to no longer showcase adult content on its home page.
He also took issue with the site’s refusal to outright ban hot tub streams when they were causing drama, accusing Twitch of boxing themselves into a corner when more controversial metas took off.
