Twitch blunder leads to porn being broadcast on Ninja’s old channel

Twitch has not had the best August, to put it lightly. First the world’s biggest streamer fully defects to its heretofore-niche competitor, Mixer, and now, over the weekend, it’s apparently been busted for letting pornography through its filters — and promoting it on said streamer’s channel.

How in the heck did we get here?

When Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced he was moving from Twitch to Mixer, the focus was mostly on the latter. Given Mixer’s not a very large or well-known website, there was some curiosity as to how it’d handle the sudden influx of fans that would follow Ninja to the platform. As for Twitch, it’s now got menagerie of other, equally interesting talent to fill the gap. Twitch even put out a boilerplate statement wishing Ninja the best.

The only thing that seemed odd was that, after Ninja departed the platform, his Twitch channel was rejiggered into a promotional page for other Fortnite streamers, complete with a lame Mario joke.

This was a little curious, because usually when a Twitch channel goes dormant, it’s left otherwise intact. It’s a landing page where you can find saved videos and clips from past streams — it’s not used to promote other, similar streamers.

Welp, one of the streamers Twitch promoted on Ninja’s channel apparently streamed pornography. Keep in mind, Ninja’s audience (as with everything related to Fortnite) skews young.

Drama peddler Keemstar was apparently the first to spot the untoward material, and Twitch CEO Emmett Shear later confirmed its existence:

2/ 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.

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019

Shear also said the streaming recommendations were an experiment (that was being run on the most popular streamer’s channel, uh huh) that has since been suspended. If his reaction is anything to go by, this was news to Ninja:

Disgusted and so sorry. pic.twitter.com/gnUY5Kp52E

— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019

But leaving the pettier drama aside, let’s not get away from the most material of facts — a channel somehow managed to stream pornographic content (something that’s explicitly against Twitch’s Terms of Service) on the Fortnite tag. And it’s not exactly the first: Shear’s Twitter apology was filled with people reporting encounters with similar channels.

It’s a nasty problem with Twitch, and the fact that this was broadcast for Ninja’s former audience in particular just makes it worse. It begs the question: how popular was that stream that an algorithm would pick it up for this experimental recommendation? Here’s hoping the fact that this issue was blown up means the crackdown is a little harsher and more thorough than it otherwise would have been. Sure, there will always be someone trying to sneak something past Twitch’s filters, but I’m certain the site’s personnel can do better than allowing it to hit the page of one of the world’s most-watched streamers.

Ninja’s channel has since been reverted to its original landing page.