Congressman Under Investigation For 'Sex Trafficking' Caps Off Twitch's Worst Week Ever
First Amazon-owned Twitch was ravaged by a major gambling scandal. Then it revealed a new, worse revenue split for creators because it had to charge itself too much for servers. Next Bloomberg reported that the platform has a major problem when it comes to potential predators using it to target children. And now Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who’s being investigated for human trafficking and allegedly having sex with a minor, has announced his plan to use the platform to spread his racist dog whistles. “Is it Friday yet?”asked someone at Twitch, probably.
As a platform owned by a monopolistic logistics company known for squeezing competitors and union-busting its workers, and which is regularly scrutinized over how it handles instances of misogyny, racism, and other hateful behavior that occur on it, Twitch is no stranger to controversy.
But even in that context, this week has been a particularly bad one. The backlash over gambling spurred it to hastily announce some murky new rules, and somehow led to one streamer getting suspended over an alleged sexual assualt cover-up. Streamers have also been raising hell over Twitch’s decision to pay them less money, with threats to boycott TwitchCon 2022 next month.
In the middle of all this Bloomberg reported that, according to a study shared with it as well as its own research, a total of 1,976 users had potentially targeted 279,016 children on Twitch over the span of two years. “Even one single instance of grooming is abhorrent to us,” Twitch’s chief product officer, Tom Verrilli, told Bloomberg. “If it’s valid, the data you reference demonstrates that we are not offering the level of protection we strive for yet—which is deeply upsetting. This work is vitally important to everyone at Twitch, and we’ll never stop.”
Link to tweet
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/congressman-under-investigation-sex-trafficking-215500477.html
