Streaming platform Twitch recently announced a change to its sexual content policies that allowed some forms of fictionalized nudity—such as digital characters, sculptures, or drawings—as long as it was properly labeled. But now, just a few days later, it’s rolling back these changes and has apologized to the community.
Earlier this month, a new Twitch trend kicked off a firestorm of discourse and angry men yelling about women. Some women were streaming themselves using certain camera angles to appear topless. This new “topless meta”—like the hot tub meta from before—saw some women successfully trying out the trend on the streaming site, some getting banned, and a lot more dudes getting very angry about it all. In response, Twitch stepped in on December 13 and updated its sexual content policies, hoping to streamline some confusion and keep correctly labeled adult content off the homepage, but still on the site. It also officially allowed digital and fictionalized nudity. And two days later, Twitch seems to regret that specific choice.
In a post on December 15, Twitch’s CEO, Dan Clancy, admitted that its new policy changes allowing fictional nudity had led to a small uptick in people making content that broke the rules, but had also led to an influx of nudity that did follow the rules. The community response to all this new, totally-allowed artistic nudity was strong and not completely positive, leading to Twitch reverting its changes.
“So, effective today, we are rolling back the artistic nudity changes,” Clancy said. “Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games. You can find emote-specific standards for nudity and sexual content in the Emote Guidelines.”
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Twitch suggested the company went “too far” when altering the nudity policy. It further explained that digital nudity presents a “unique challenge” due to AI-generated images which can look photorealistic but are still digital, fictionalized characters, technically.
While Twitch is rolling back the artistic nudity guidelines, the company did clarify that the other changes involving exotic dancing, body painting or content focused on certain clothed parts of the body weren’t being reverted.
“While I wish we would have predicted this outcome, part of our job is to make adjustments that serve the community,” Clancy said. “I apologize for the confusion that this update has caused.”
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