Skip to main content

Ninja disgusted at Twitch after porn stream was promoted on his channel

Ninja disgusted at Twitch after porn stream was promoted on his channel

/

Twitch has been promoting other channels on his page

Share this story

Image: Ninja

This afternoon, streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins posted a video to Twitter to address an issue concerning his former Twitch profile page: the streaming platform had begun to promote other streamers in his place, including a channel streaming pornography earlier this morning.

Earlier this month, Blevins announced that he was leaving Twitch for another streaming platform, Microsoft-owned Mixer, where he quickly gained a million subscribers within five days. In his video, Blevins says that the transition “went incredibly smooth, super professional,” but noticed in the last couple days that “there have been some things going on that, you know, we let slide. They were kind of annoying little jabs we felt like, but it didn’t matter, we wanted to stay professional.” Twitch also removed Blevins’ verification checkmark not long after his Mixer exclusivity announcement.

Twitch began promoting other channels to his former profile page last week, one of which appears to have been streaming pornography, which was captured in screenshots by users on Twitter today. Blevins says that the channel streaming porn had been bumped to the number one spot, and apologized to users who might have seen it. As of the time of this writing, Ninja’s profile page doesn’t display other channels.

This isn’t the first time that Twitch channels have streamed porn: the company temporarily suspended new creators from streaming back after a group of trolls abused a section with pornography, illegal content and other restricted material earlier this year.

In a series of Tweets, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear apologized to Blevins for the incident, and explained that they had been “experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline,” and that they’ve suspended the recommendations “while we investigate how this content came to be promoted.” He also says that the channel that streamed the pornography had been “permanently suspended.”

Blevins alleged that his channel was singled out, saying that no other departed streamers had other channels promoted on their page. He indicated that he has no control over what was being promoted, and noted in a followup Tweet that “this wouldn’t even have been an issue if they didnt use my channel to promote others in the first place.” He also says in the video that he and his team were working to try and get the “whole channel taken down to begin with, or at least not promote other streamers and channels on my brand, on my frickin’ profile.”

Update, August 11th at 8:30PM ET: Updated to include comments from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear.