One of the worlds biggest streamers, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, has been hit with more problems as he looks toward the future. The streamer recently made a deal with Microsoft to stream exclusively on Mixer. Out of this deal, he immediately put his channel into an inactive state, hiding his content on the service. Apparently, Twitch saw an opportunity here, and began using the massive channel to promote the most popular livestreams on the site.
Within that list, one of the channels listed was openly streaming pornographic content. This stream was simply rebroadcasting explicit scenes from various pornographic videos, and quickly garnered thousands of viewers before it was reported and removed by Twitch administrators. Not only is porn against the policies of the site, but linking one of the biggest streamers to both sexually explicit content and copyright infringement is just a terrible look.
Understandably, Ninja was actually rather upset about the whole thing. After all, he spent years building his brand and online identity, and now that he’s switched to Mixer, Twitch could have easily undone a lot of his work in one simple mistake. It was a mistake, hopefully, but that doesn’t revoke culpability for the streaming service.
On August 11th, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins responded with a video on his personal Twitter, saying he was disgusted with the whole thing.
Twitch does not condone live streams of “sexually explicit content and activities, such as pornography, sexual acts, and sexual services, including solicitation and offers for such content”, so that leaves questions as to how this service was allowed, as well as how it came to be featured on the dormant channel.
To their credit, Twitch’s CEO Emmett Shear has responded to the controversy directly.
“Our community comes to Twitch looking for live content. To help ensure they find great, live channels we’ve been experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline,” Shear stated. “This helps all streamers as it creates new community connections. However, the lewd content that appeared on the Ninja offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service, and we’ve permanently suspended the account in question.”
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins says that his channel was being used in an unexpected way, and that this explicit content being featured only makes things worse. All in all, it seems like the apology was not really accepted. Blevins’ wife and manager Jessica Blevins posted a Tweet that called out the CEO’s response as disingenuous. She labeled the comments as “PR control”. She also accused the service of “trying to kill the Ninja brand”, seemingly as a pushback against the switch to a rival service. Whether these controversial accusations are true may never be known.
