Twitch is taking an important step in its commitment to security by publishing its first Global Transparency Report.
Twitch Transparency Report – The report provides a comprehensive view of their approach to security, the actions they have taken to enforce the Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, and their response to government requests for information over the past year about the huge growth of the audience.
Community safety is the top priority and, as a result, Trust and Safety is the area with the highest investment.
Twitch is unique in that most content is ephemeral and live, so it can’t be addressed with content removal alone.
As such, a layered approach to security has been developed, combining the efforts of Twitch (through technology and staff) and community members, working together. This Transparency Report will provide more clarity on the approach to safety in the community and will hold Twitch accountable for tracking your progress.
Some key points:
- The report shows increases in the number of violations and reports throughout 2020. This is largely due to the exponential increase in service use.
- From the first half of 2020 to the second half of 2020, there was a 40% increase in the total number of channels that went live, a 29% increase in the number of unique streaming channels, and a 33% increase in chat messages sent on the service.
- To put these increases in context, Twitch’s average daily visitors grew from 17.5 million to 30 million throughout 2020.
- The Twitch community watched over a billion minutes of content in 2020.
- At any given time, there are now over 2.5 million people tuning in to Twitch and 7 million unique creators streaming each month.
- The report also shows a significant increase in the number of executions taken by Twitch, reflecting its investment and effective use of better tools, technology, policies, and operations to investigate and mitigate toxicity. Specifically, steps have been taken to improve user reporting, moderation tools, reviewability, and machine learning for detection.
- From the first half of 2020 to the second half, Twitch quadrupled the number of content moderation professionals available to respond to user reports, resulting in a 96% reduction in average report response time. Our offensive username detection model blocked 3x the number of offensive usernames this year compared to last year, and our technology solutions created a 70% decrease in spam reports related to the Whisper option .
- While the report shows an increase in the number of executions in all categories, in particular, the escalation to law enforcement saw a sharp decline of 55% during the second half of 2020. This is largely due to the lack of public meetings due to COVID-19.
- Safety is not an end state and there is work ahead. Twitch will continue to invest heavily in this area as it is a key priority for the service. This report will serve as a benchmark for improvements over time, which will be reported on this date every six months.
