Recently Blizzard announced an interesting initiative, in which they’re not only banning Overwatch players based on player reports in-game, but they will also be trawling social media to look for players who exhibit toxic behavior but who have not been reported or who somehow managed to escape being banned.Now it looks like Twitch is looking to do the same, where your bad behavior off the platform could potentially lead to indefinite bans. This is a change to Twitch’s Community Guidelines in which the platform is now clamping down on hateful behavior, in which they claim has no place within Twitch’s community.
They also add, “Additionally, we will now consider verifiable hateful or harassing conduct that takes place off-Twitch when making moderation decisions for actions that occur on Twitch. If you use other services to direct hate or harassment towards someone on Twitch, we will consider it a violation of Twitch’s policies.”
Basically if people think that they can go harass streamers or viewers once they log off Twitch, there is a chance that their actions could affect whether or not they can use the platform. Twitch has stated that these new rules will be going into effect on the 19th of February, 2018. For those who are interested, head on over to Twitch’s website to check out the updated guidelines.