Twitch pauses new feature after accidentally promoting porn

If there’s anywhere on the internet where rule 34 is likely to thrive, it’s Twitch, the streaming platform predominantly used by gamers.

Yet somehow, the Amazon-owned company seems to have been taken by surprise when its new Boost Train feature enabling the paid promotion of streams started recommending porn to its audience.

Launched in October 2021 to a select number of growing streamers, the now disabled experimental feature promised creators the potential to get their channel promoted to the top spot of Twitch’s main homepage.

The paid boosts were modeled after a similar yet more community-driven feature, which only allowed organic engagement from viewers to get a streamer’s broadcast pushed onto Twitch’s “Live channels we think you’ll like” section.

But by changing the barrier to entry from community activity to a pay-to-play model instead, Twitch allowed anyone with enough cash to get whatever content they wanted officially recommended.

Soon enough, NSFW screenshots began surfacing on Twitter and Reddit of live broadcasts with topless women and the “Promoted by streamer’s community” banner in the thumbnail.

“Looks like determined trolls are literally paying for accounts with access to the Boost Train… and then literally creating hype trains to get porn onto the front page,” streaming reporter Zach Bussey theorized on Twitter.

Tweet may have been deleted

Getting streams onto Twitch’s coveted recommendation slots through Boost Trains costs a hefty chunk of change. So Bussey speculates that these pornographic streams were likely a result of coordinated troll campaigns wanting to protest the company’s attempt at implementing paid promotions. The new feature essentially snuck paid ads into recommendation sections that used to exclusively highlight streamers who earned their spot through hard-won organic engagement.

Back in December, Bussey also called the benefits of these pricey paid promotions into question, after collecting data that suggested Boost Trains didn’t do much of anything to help streamers reach new audiences like the platform promised. Poor discoverability has been a longstanding issue for both users and aspiring creators on Twitch, which the company claimed this expensive new feature would help solve.

“[But Boost Trains were] deeply unpopular with the community,” Bussey told Kotaku. “It should’ve never been released. Monetizing front page discovery for a service that struggles to offer any discovery is a recipe for disaster — and so here we are.”

Before disabling Boost Trains altogether, the offending streams were at first being individually banned for violating Twitch’s Terms of Service.

“Sexually explicit content—including pornography—is not allowed on Twitch, per our community guidelines,” a Twitch representative clarified in a statement provided to several outlets. “We’ve decided to pause Boost Train due to some safety considerations that came up through the experiment… Our experiments help us learn and make even better tools for the community, and we’re using the feedback from this experiment to inform how we approach future launches.”

You’d think a platform as notoriously puritanical as Twitch would already be better equipped to filter out porn

You’d think a platform as notoriously puritanical as Twitch would already be better equipped to filter out porn by now, though. Users misappropriating a tool on the internet for porn is, well, one of the most predictable turn of events imaginable. This also isn’t the first time Twitch proved incapable of keeping pornography off its platform populated by an especially young demographic. It very likely won’t be the last, either.

This recent Boost Train snafu is only the latest headache to arise from the platform’s notoriously hypocritical stances around sexuality. Twitch’s community guidelines infamously include a conservative dress code widely criticized for disproportionately penalizing streamers who have the audacity to own breasts, along with other inexplicable double standards like banning fully clothed cosplayers yet providing bikinied streamers with a dedicated hot tub subcategory.

With a projected net worth of $6 billion in 2022, it’s clear Twitch remains dedicated to making the platform as profitable as possible, no matter what. But it remains unclear whether it will start to prioritize the users and creators who generate that profit in future monetization pursuits.