Valve’s latest game Artifact is a failure for the company as the interest in game died within 2 weeks after its launch. The game can hardly manage to pull 500 peak players or even more than 200 concurrent players at a time, but the game has become a sensational hit among some trolls on Twitch.
Twitch’s Artifact section was one of site’s least popular section and was largely unused, until some trolls saw this as an opportunity and hijackedthis section to livestream content that largely violated Twitch’s own TOS (Terms of Service).
It all started with some trolls using bots to stream memes or meme videos in loops for hours. But a simple joke soon turned into a category of streamsfilled with random crap which included reruns of popular streamer’s gameplay; TV series marathons (latest season of Game of Thrones); entire movies (cam-print of Avengers:Endgame);pornography, hentai amines or in some extreme cases videos of hate speech and terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Some people started tweeting about the content being streamed under Artifact category on Twitch with some big names like Rod Breslau (aka Slasher) calling out Twitch for this slipup. Although even after reports of illegal and hate filled content being streamed, Twitch was slow to act and trolls were able to stream more than 30minutes of the Christchurch Terror attack.
Rod’s tweet ultimately got Twitch’s attention and the stream was taken down immediately with channel and videos of the same being deleted. But this isn’t the first time things like this has happened which clearly shows Twitch’s inability to properly moderate TOS compliant content on their site. This became evident after Twitch let trolls exploit Artifact section for days without taking a notice of the situation or even acknowledging it.
Soon the Twitch Support tweeted in response to the “exploit” and said:
“Over the weekend we became aware of a number of accounts targeting the “Artifact” game directory to share content that grossly violates our terms of service. Our investigations uncovered that the majority of accounts that shared and viewed the content were automated.”
They soon posted a follow-up tweet stating that they were working on removing the content and suspending all accounts related to said content and apologised for this mess-up. As a follow-up measure to stop this exploit running amok again Twitch has temporarily suspended new accounts ability to stream on the platform.
But the question still remains how such a big platform can effectively moderate the content being streamed on their site that remains compliant to their own TOS. Twitch’s temporary measures are just Kneejerk reaction to exploit.We can only hope that Twitch would come up with a better solution after this mess-up so this doesn’t affect genuine streamers and games.
