Twitch can be a wonderfully diverse place. My morning routine goes coffee, emails, then find a Twitch stream to have on my fourth monitor while I work. That can be anything from a standard game playthrough, to a live podcast, to someone just chatting about their life. Often, I will check out creators I’m less familiar with. Sometimes that can give me some unexpected results.
In the Just Chatting category recently, Twitch streamer Morgpie appears to be in full conversational flow before she presses a clicker twice and yells, “Place!” A PVC-clad person crawls from beneath her desk and on to what appears to be a pet bed, before Morgpie throws some treats in their direction. It’s sparked conversation across social media, with many complaining that “fetishized” content like this shouldn’t be shown on the streaming platform.
Further, a post on X, which was widely shared, claimed that Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said, “It doesn’t violate our TOS, and she wasn’t viewbotting. As far as I’m concerned, this also appears to be consensual. I admire the innovation streamers bring to the platform.” However, that post was unsourced and Clancy never made the statement.
The streamed event has also raised the question of why other creators are having emotes banned with similar content. VTuber Nekrolina has an emote depicting herself in an animal collar with leash. “This emote was removed by Twitch.tv for fetish content,” she explains on stream. “But literal fetish content is not removed. I think there are some double standards happening around here.”
She approaches the conversation in a lighthearted way, but the reality is that Twitch emotes are subject to stricter guidance since they can be used in channels that don’t use mature-content disclaimers. Content including sexual features must be appropriately labelled across Twitch with a content classification label, or CCL. Those CCLs can’t be applied to emotes, which explains why they might be banned when action on an individual channel might not be taken.
For streams with the CCL applied, they’ll be marked with a mature-content warning, and Twitch accounts must be 18 years old to view them. There is an age-verification process in place across the streaming site.
While the stark difference in action from Twitch between the two instances of mature content being shown on the site is evident, the actual guidelines that users agree to abide by when streaming on or viewing streams on Twitch shows the platform isn’t breaking its own rules here. And Clancy never endorsed Morgpie’s stream that got everyone talking. At least not publicly–we don’t know his personal thoughts on PVC-clad pets, after all.
