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?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
- 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?
Resolution: Emote-only mode was launched quietly with little fanfare from Twitch in 2016. While it may not be widely used, many streamers do find it useful. It is not just used for stopping harassment, but sometimes to stop people in a chat from revealing spoilers or other information that may impact what they?re streaming (such as information about the video game they are playing).
Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.
Filed Under: content moderation, emotes, harassment
Companies: twitch
Comments on “Content Moderation Case Study: Twitch Allows Users To Enable Emote-Only Chats (2016)”
That’s why there’s emote-only chat? well ok then.
i hardly think this is offliading moderation. who else is supposed to moderate their own chat anyway?
now it’s also an option to turn on emote-only chat briefly for viewers who have collected enough channel points (on channels that use them and have that "reward" left available). now moderation is just more entertainment. poggers.
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Re: Kroger ESchedule Online
Does Kroger ESchedule have an emoji only mode too?
That would be sooo cool. A smiley face would be a day off while an angry face would be not getting your cost of living adj, aka; what now passes for a raise.
Emotes have come back under discussion recently because of the PogChamp incident; this seems like the perfect time to bring up this case study.
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That’s a case study all it’s own.
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To go with a lame but caught on term – isn’t that just a case of "milkshake duck"? Something features someone doing something fun and then it comes out that they are a terrible person in some way overshadowing the original context.
Said term comes from a twitter joke describing the phenomenon with a joke about a duck drinking a milkshake and then finding out the duck was racist.
Emoji chat redoux
You mean where a single character means a whole word, phrase, or idea? Like chi ese and similar…heiroglyphics Etc…
Essentially, there is an inverse relationship between a streamer’s audience size, and the amount of effort they’ll put into channel interactions. When they only have a few folks, or if their stream is only to hang out with close friends, there’s more direct interaction with their audience. However, when a streamer reaches a certain size, it becomes impossible to meaningfully interact with that many people at once, so the chat is really only interacting with itself, if even that. Chat can be flooded and updating so rapidly interaction is difficult and meaningless, so it turns into cheerleading at that point. If you need to resort to the emote-only chat feature, that’s essentially what you’ve turned your chat into, and you’re sending the message you only want cheerleading.
Have a good day!
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Have a good day!
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Have a good day!
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Have a good day!
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