Twitch Bans Word “Incel,” Sparks Irony
By: Kate Irwin
Tags: Twitch, Gaming, Videogames, Digital Life, Features

Twitch Bans Word “Incel,” Sparks Irony

The platform still fails to tackle hate speech, hatefarming, and other forms of incel culture

In a virtual Town Hall on December 16th, Twitch announced that they’d be banning some common slang words from use on their platform. Specifically, “incel,” “simp” and “virgin” will now be officially against Twitch Terms of Service (TOS) if they are “used repeatedly in a harassing manner.” In addition, any emote related to those words will be denied approval or taken down. These new policies will go into effect on January 22nd, and the words are specifically mentioned at the very end of Twitch’s blog post.

While these words are often used to bully others, Twitch streamers and viewers have taken to Twitter to voice concerns. Many are frustrated because Twitch is choosing to ban these slang words — which are often used in friendly, comedic, or benign contexts — while seemingly ignoring the actual slurs and hate speech being used on the platform.

The fact that these three words have been chosen first feels arbitrary and counter-intuitive. Other gender-based or racial slurs are still being used on the site in a range of inappropriate and offensive contexts. Perhaps Twitch thinks the state of its platform is better than it actually is. Sure, AutoMod exists, and streamers can pre-ban specific words from being published on their live chat feeds, but that’s not enough. Like how Tiktokkers misspell and use symbols to get around TikTok’s censorship rules, it’s not uncommon to see Twitch chatters intentionally misspell words to circumvent these moderation features, such as this example with simp:

Source: urbandictionary.com

While Twitch remains the leading site for gamers to broadcast live gameplay and build communities, it can also be a toxic place. “Hatefarming,” a practice where streamers find and harass other streamers while they themselves are streaming live, is something perpetuated by incel culture on the platform. Even though it’s against Twitch TOS, it still happens. This phenomenon is strange because it’s meta — there’s a “stream within a stream,” and the hatefarmer effectively rips off someone else’s content to generate their own.

This is harmful because hatefarmers are bullying other streamers and using hate speech to generate income and “content.” They will find a streamer to target, watch their stream, react live to their content and send their viewers and moderators over to that person’s stream with the sole intent of harassment, trolling, and making the targeted streamer uncomfortable. If the targeted streamer ignores them or otherwise makes it difficult to farm “content” (i.e. by quickly putting their chat into subscriber-only mode), the hatefarmer will return to the browsing page of Twitch to search for a new victim.

While there are things victims can do to salvage their streams, the obligation to halt hatefarming should not solely fall on its victims. Because these malicious streamers are using the medium of Twitch to organize their internet crusades, Twitch needs to take more action instead of just expecting victims to shut down their chats and use the “report” feature after violations happen.

As a Twitch streamer myself, I have unfortunately been the victim of hatefarming incidents on multiple occasions. Perhaps the most notable was when I was playing Apex Legends on stream and was suddenly bombarded with numerous people in my chat, all using hateful slurs and harassing me. Apparently, the offending streamer who told his viewers to go to my stream had decided I was transgender (I am cisgender), and so his “community” (if you can even call it that) overwhelmed my stream with transphobic slurs and misogynist harassment.

After the fact, I realized I wasn’t alone in this experience — many streamers on Twitch have dealt with targeted harassment campaigns from incel streamers who generate hate-based content on Twitch. It’s become an issue for both small and big streamers, to the point that Dr.K, Harvard-educated psychiatrist and founder of healthygamer.gg, has discussed this issue with some of the well-known streamers he interviews on his Twitch broadcasts. He investigates the mental health impacts streaming has on its creators, especially those who have been victims of harassment as a result of using Twitch’s platform.

While the hatefarmer who harassed me was indeed banned (after myself and members of my community filed reports citing the video evidence), it was only temporary. The streamer has since returned to Twitch under a new name, according to his Instagram page. So while Twitch does sometimes take action against severe cases of bullying and harassment, that only comes after the damage has been done and mass reports are made against the perpetrator. And after a ban, a perpetrator can create a new account and resume their behavior under a new alias.

So the irony here is that Twitch is banning words like “incel” without taking any dramatic action to actually combat the incel culture that lingers on the platform.

The truth is, hatefarmers and their audiences are the very definitions of incel culture. So while the word “incel” obviously has a negative connotation, there is a very real, hate-based community that is best defined by using this word. Deleting the word does not delete this subculture. In fact, it does the opposite. Without a term to define what is happening to them, it makes it harder for victims to describe the perpetrators of the harassment they are experiencing. Banning the word “incel” effectively silences victims who are experiencing abuse from incels on the platform and might otherwise speak out about it. The irony is painful here, as banning this word harms the marginalized groups Twitch says they want to protect.

Countless media outlets such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vox, and Rolling Stone have covered the rise of incel culture articulately and intelligently. While initially coined to reference someone’s status as an “involuntary celibate,” the word now encompasses a much larger range of meaning that often has more to do with one’s ideological beliefs than it does their sexual activity or lack thereof. So Twitch’s claim that the word is being used to “negatively refer to another person’s sexual practices” doesn’t quite track. Most importantly, this word is being used to call out bad behavior and identify those who may be a part of incel culture and its alt-right ideologies, which often perpetuate actual discriminatory hate speech against marginalized groups.

Banning the word from Twitch functions as an attempt to improve Twitch’s public image. But if you look at the frustrations on Twitter regarding these word bans, you’ll see that Twitch’s decision has done harm to their reputation as well. Many see this as a surface-level effort to reduce bullying. They’re upset that Twitch hasn’t taken more steps to reduce and prevent severe incidents of hate speech from occurring on the platform in the first place.

According to Twitch, using these freshly-banned words won’t always lead to enforcement. They are still allowed to be used in neutral contexts. So while this sounds like great news, it brings up the issue of subjectivity in Twitch’s enforcement policies. The platform has a history of inconsistency in its enforcement of TOS.

But that’s not to say that Twitch isn’t doing anything productive to combat harassment and promote inclusivity. They are taking baby steps. While well-intentioned, banning “simp,” “incel” and “virgin” won’t do much. What’ll do more is suspending or banning users who use emotes in racist ways, another new addition to Twitch’s TOS that also sounds like it will be enforced subjectively, on a case-by-case basis. Context matters, and that’s largely good, but future inconsistency in enforcement could discredit these initiatives.

For the most part, Twitch remains untamed. It’s up to the individual streamer to regulate their own chat, pre-ban bad words, bring on friends as unpaid moderators, and attempt to filter the unfiltered masses of viewers coming in. As a platform, Twitch needs to remove more of this burden from victimized streamers and take more responsibility for the subcultures that have proliferated on their site.

Photo by ELLA DON on Unsplash.

It’s time for Twitch to more actively promote and enforce a cultural shift of ethics for the entire platform. The focus going forward should be on prevention as well as further restrictions that stop TOS-violating users from creating new accounts. The issues Twitch faces are systemic and platform-based, so future solutions should be geared toward reducing the burden currently placed on victims. The report feature as it stands right now is cumbersome and could be retooled to be more intuitive and in-the-moment instead of after-the-fact.

While Twitch’s Town Hall announcement and updates to the TOS are a step in the right direction in some ways, it’s also a bit like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. Hopefully, with a bit of luck, we can see the platform make more inclusive changes in the future that address the platform’s ongoing issues.