Twitch Says It's Getting Better at Detecting and Blocking Young Users

Twitch is cracking down on accounts belonging to users under the age of 13 as part of its efforts to protect children on the platform. From a report: In a post on Twitch's safety center, the Amazon-owned company announced that it's improving its methods for detecting and terminating the accounts belonging to young users and is also working on ways to block users who were previously suspended for being under 13. These changes come after a report from Bloomberg revealed rampant child predation on the platform. The report, first published in September, analyzed 1,976 accounts on Twitch with follower lists made up of 70 percent or more users who are kids or young teenagers. According to Bloomberg, a total of 279,016 children were targeted by these alleged predators on Twitch.

In addition to "expanding the signals" it uses to catch and block users under the age of 13, Twitch is going to introduce mandatory phone verification requirements to "potentially vulnerable accounts" before they can start livestreaming. While Twitch doesn't expand on how it will identify these accounts, it says this should help the platform prevent young users who lie about their age from becoming exposed to child predators during livestreams.

How they did it

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

Their AI suggested they use the following SQL query to select and remove all the users under 13:

DROP DATABASE Users;

Re:

[stedlj]

That would be great because it would include the ones that act like they are 13.

Iâ(TM)ll always miss

[LondoMollari]

..Getting called a (sexual orientation slur) and that my mother has had a liaison with the person speaking.

What if I'm simply childish?

[devslash0]

It's fun being immature.

Re:

[dohzer]

sorry but twitch is for serious business only fr fr no cap POGGERS borpaSpin

Those under 13.

[bjwest]

The responsibility for safety of anyone under 13 with unsupervised access to the internet, who makes an account on any social media site against the TOS, should not rest on the social media site. It is the parents responsibility to know what their minor children are doing at all times, and keep them safe. Parent your child! This isn't the Television of the 80s or earlier, where you can plop them down and forget about them, this is the Internet, for god’s sake. A place where anyone and damn near ev

Oh goody

[OfMiceAndMenus]

Another way for them to elicit personal information to sell off and further make a cesspool of their site.

I can see it now:
"We have detected you using OMEGALUL too many times and suspect you are an underaged user. Please scan your Driver's License, Social Security Card, and Provide Bank Account Details to verify your age."

Fuck that noise. I won't even give them my phone number to be "verified" in their god-awful chats. Only the cancerous 20k+ viewer streams require that shit anyway.