SAN FRANCISCO — Following a string of community controversies, the popular gaming website Twitch unveiled a new harassment policy aimed at cultivating the development of new, more inventive slurs, the company announced from its headquarters today.
“Since 2011, Twitch has been the premier destination on the internet for the incubation of online gaming toxicity,” said CEO Emmett Shear in a statement. “However, we’ve recently observed that our harassment policy has become outdated. That’s why we’re excited to unveil these new policies to help foster the development of the next generation of hate speech. Our community knows exactly how to sidestep our rules, and we’re confident that these changes will inspire and motivate them to create wildly inventive new toxic memes and dog whistles that none of us could possibly imagine today.”
Some Twitch users believe that the new rules, while restrictive, will ultimately have a positive impact for the community.
“Apparently they banned the words ‘simp’ and ‘virgin’ in chat, which is really a bummer,” said a Twitch user who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being banned. “But I’m not going to let this stop me. I’m just going to have to come up with even more cryptic phrases to sneak my horrible thoughts into the streams that I frequent. And who knows? Even if the mods catch on, me and my friends will probably have at least six months to spam these new phrases all over Twitch before they add to their list of forbidden words again. Circle of life!”
At press time, a new viral Twitter thread was urging Twitch to ban a dozen new hateful phrases that had sprung up since their announcement.