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Twitch temporarily suspends new creators in face of Artifact targeting

The continued degeneration of Twitch's Artifact channels have forced the livestream provider to step in and put a temporary moratorium on new creators.
Ozzie Mejia
Ozzie Mejia
5

When it rains, it appears to pour for Valve's collectible card game, Artifact, but now the stormclouds have spread over Twitch. Over the weekend, a story broke that Twitch streamers had been exploiting the game's low viewership numbers to fill its Twitch category with numerous videos that are definitely not Artifact. Among the most troubling things posted was the terrorirst attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which aired for a full half-hour before Twitch moderators stepped in and removed the video. Twitch has now issued a statement regarding what's becoming a widespread issue and is temporarily suspending new creators for the time being.

"Over the weekend we became aware of a number of accounts targeting the 'Artifact' game directory to share content that grossly violates our terms of service," reads the Twitch statement. "Our investigations uncovered that the majority of accounts that shared and viewed the content were automated accounts. We are working with urgency to remove the offending content and suspend all accounts engaged in this behavior. In addition, we have temporarily suspended the ability for new creators to stream. We take these violations very seriously and are taking measures to prevent this kind of coordinated activity on our service in the future."

Esports guru Rod "Slasher" Breslau was among the first to spotlight the sudden surge of NSFW content on Artifact channels, making sure to call out Twitch on Twitter for its lack of action. The aforementioned terrorist attack rose to over 2,500 viewers before Twitch ultimately stepped in.

There is no word on how long Twitch will maintain this moratorium on new creators. But a line has clearly been crossed and Twitch is now looking into drastic measures to ensure something like what happened over the weekend will never happen again. So far, whatever they're doing is not working, because the Twitch Artifact directory continues to look like the wild west.

Senior Editor
Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

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