THE SYNDICATE PROJECT TWITCH PROFESSIONAL
With limited options for reporting and removing the content, she says she’s left with a choice: putting up with the stream of online hate or leaving her professional field entirely. Searching her name online pulls up pages of tweets, subreddits and comment threads calling her a liar and worse. Today she is left fending off online hate from McKechnie’s fans with the limited toolkit provided by the platforms where she makes her living. After a court case in the Netherlands, where Roelofs lives, opened a criminal investigation in 2018, the abuse only intensified. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit - name the platform and Roelofs has been harassed, doxed and threatened by other users. Roelofs says this dedicated fan base has been waging a relentless campaign against her. McKechnie’s videos about science and the future have been collectively viewed over 145 million times on his channel.
After accusing professional YouTuber Alexander McKechnie of raping her in 2016, Roelofs has faced a stream of death threats and hateful messages from his fans, who number in the millions. The upgraded policy puts Twitch a step ahead of other platforms, such as YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, where female and non-binary content creators say harassment is also pervasive.įor YouTuber Pieke Roelofs, the threats haven’t stopped coming. They added that the policy was just one of “a number of projects underway to address hate and harassment.” “Our recent policy updates take a clearer and more consistent stance against hate and harassment, and enable us to enforce our guidelines more consistently,” said a Twitch spokesperson in an email. Users can now report other gamers for making repeated comments on perceived attractiveness. It now promises a “much lower tolerance for objectifying or harassing behavior” and a ban on sending unsolicited nude images and videos, an issue many users flagged in June 2020. The updated policy eschewed any major upheaval on the company’s gaming network. Nearly six months later, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, announced a new hateful conduct and harassment policy, which went into effect on January 22. He promised to extinguish “systemic sexism, racism and abuse” in the gaming industry. “I’ve heard your voices,” tweeted Twitch CEO Emmett Shear on June 23. Platforms and gaming executives responded with promises to rid their spaces of bad behavior. By July 3, it listed over 400 accusations of harassment, manipulation and sexual assault. One New York-based streamer, Jessica Richey, started collecting the posts in a Google spreadsheet. Over several days in June 2020, there were dozens, and later hundreds of posts ranging from accusations of inappropriate comments during gaming streams and rape at industry conferences. But instead, here, that’s engagement with the platform.” “If this was a store and you had someone come in and scream all these expletives and hateful language at one of your employees, you would chuck them out of the store. “In a normal workplace if your employees are getting harassed this way, you would do something,” said Karen Skardzius, who researches Twitch streamers and platform regulation at York University in Toronto. Many of the users involved are financially dependent on ad revenue from their online streams or posts, making these platforms essentially their place of business.
That online platforms function as workplaces for content creators and that harassment and abuse threaten their livelihoods is rarely addressed in discussions on platform regulation and the industry’s self-policing policies. From YouTube to Twitter and Reddit, big-name content creators - almost exclusively male - were getting away with creating online worlds that amplified the harassment women have fought for decades to eradicate from their workplace.
THE SYNDICATE PROJECT TWITCH OFFLINE
Starting as a trickle, female and non-binary online gamers and streamers began posting stories of online and offline harassment by men, a problem they said was rife across the industry.Īccusations of misogynistic comments, threats of rape, revenge porn and doxxing spread to other social media platforms, not just the ones centered on gaming. Last June the gaming industry had a moment of reckoning.
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