Content Moderation Case Study: Twitch Allows Users To Enable Emote-Only Chats (2016)
from the can't-be-a-troll-when-you-can-only-emote dept
Summary: Dealing with content moderation during real-time chats always presents an interesting challenge. Whether it’s being able to police language in real time, or dealing with trolling and harassment, chat has always been one of the most difficult content moderation challenges going back to its earliest days.
In 2016, Twitch decided to enable a new feature for its users: an “emote-only” mode for the chat. Emotes, on Twitch, are basically a custom set of what are more traditionally called emoji on most other websites/platforms. With Twitch, though, they are almost entirely custom, and users at certain levels are able to add their own.
Emote-only is one of a bunch of different modes and features that Twitch streamers can use to try to tame their chat. Twitch itself suggests using this as a way to stop harassment in the chats.
Turning on and off the feature is a choice for the streamer themselves, rather than Twitch. It’s just one of a few tools that Twitch users can enable to deal with potentially harassing behavior in the chat alongside their streams.
Decisions for Twitch:
- What tools should you provide to users to deal with abusive or harassing chat participants?
- Do features like this give more power to Twitch users, or are they offloading moderation demands from the company itself?
- Should there be any exceptions to emote-only mode?
- Are there times where a custom emote would be considered a policy violation because it takes on a harassing meaning in a certain context?
- What sort of emote review processes should be put in place?
- Rather than offering entirely binary options (allow/disallow) are there more creative alternatives for dealing with harassing behavior?
- Are there ways in which even emote-only mode might be abused for harassment?
Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.
Filed Under: content moderation, emotes, harassment
Companies: twitch
