Twitch Is Making Its Rules More Simple To Understand

Twitch is trying to stay relevant in the online world by giving more clarity about why and how it executes its policies. The latest release last 7 October revealed that the company added some Enforcement Notes, which it describes as "additional clarifications and examples within the Community Guidelines designed to make our rules easier to follow."

It will be recalled that a few months ago, Twitch repported that they are striving to be more transparent and do a better job of telling rule-breakers why their accounts were suspended.

Twitch announced that the Enforcement Notes will outline how its rules apply to the trends their users see on the platform. For example, if a new trending topic violates one of Twitch’s policies, it will publish a note under that rule, clarifying precisely which behaviors are and aren’t out of bounds. It will also publish new notes in response to data spikes it observes, widespread community confusion or trending discussions on social media.

The company has already incuded several enforcement notes to its community guidelines safety page. For example, one note says selling activities that could cause harm in exchange for money (like taking shots for subscriptions) is forbidden under its "Self-destructive behavior" rule.

Morever, the notes states under "Sexual content" that direct links to websites that primarily provide intimate content aren't allowed on the platform. Under "Impersonation," it states that if someone else is posing as the user can be reported with the imitating stream to Twitch when it doesn’t qualify for a DMCA removal.

Twitch says its enforcement notes won’t replace any of its existing methods of communication with users, like blog posts or tweets. Instead, the company describes the notes as "a source of truth for all policy and enforcement updates."

At the moment, the easiest way to learn about Enforcement Notes is through a browser page search on the community guidelines page. However, Twitch says it will eventually add a visual symbol to indicate new ones. It’s also working on a built-in search feature to make the notes easier to spot without using Cmd-F or Ctrl-F.