Yesterday, we released new Branded Content Guidelines that impacted your ability to work with sponsors to increase your income from streaming. These guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch, and we are removing them immediately. Sponsorships are critical to streamers’ growth and ability to earn income. We will not prevent your ability to enter into direct relationships with sponsors – you will continue to own and control your sponsorship business.

Today’s branded content policy update was overly broad. This created confusion and frustration, and we apologize for that. We do not intend to limit streamers’ ability to enter into direct relationships with sponsors, and we understand that this is an important part of how streamers earn revenue.

No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for. This is not the community we want on Twitch, and we want you to know we are working hard to make Twitch a safer place for creators.

https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/1425550620887375876

Hate spam attacks are the result of highly motivated bad actors, and do not have a simple fix. Your reports have helped us take action–we've been continually updating our sitewide banned word filters to help prevent variations on hateful slurs, and removing bots when identified.

We’ve seen a lot of conversation about botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalized creators. You’re asking us to do better, and we know we need to do more to address these issues. That includes an open and ongoing dialogue about creator safety. Thank you to everyone who shared these difficult experiences. We were able to identify a vulnerability in our proactive filters, and have rolled out an update to close this gap and better detect hate speech in chat. We'll keep updating this to address emerging issues.

We’ve seen several tweets from creators worried that they’ve received an erroneous strike and how best to deal with that. There are a few different situations being referenced and different ways to resolve them. We’ve heard from many of you that Clips you’ve tried to delete using our mass deletion tool were still flagged. For these approximately 20 cases, we’ve fixed the issue and will reach out to affected creators. They won't receive a DMCA strike.

Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can–and should–be better for creators than they have been recently. The next few tweets will outline our plan for being better partners to creators.

blog.twitch.tv/en/2020/11/11/… We were as surprised by the number of music-related DMCA takedowns as you were. Before May, we received fewer than 50 per year. Now, we’re receiving thousands each week. This led to the warning email some of you received in October.

#BlackLivesMatter

Get informed and get involved utilizing the resources we’ve gathered in the thread below: Education:

@NPRCodeSwitch: A Decade of Watching Black People Die - npr.org/2020/05/29/865…

@TheTaskForce: Black Feminism and BLM -

@DrIbram: Racism in America - theatlantic.com/author/ibram-x…

We are shocked and saddened by the tragedy that took place in Germany today, and our deepest condolences go out to all those affected. Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against hateful conduct, and any act of violence is taken extremely seriously. We worked with urgency to remove this content and will permanently suspend any accounts found to be posting or reposting content of this abhorrent act.