Twitch is a video game streaming platform with 140 million users, more than the total votes cast in the 2016 election and almost half of the “population” of users on Twitter. After a series of scandals prompted an outcry that Twitch wasn’t doing enough about “safety,” in mid-May Twitch impaneled “the Twitch Safety Advisory Council.” According to Twitch’s blog, “This group is composed of online safety experts and Twitch creators who have a deep understanding of Twitch, its content, and its community.”
In my experience, expert committees for online public safety rarely do much to alleviate any harm, but they are deft at manufacturing theories about how words are “harmful” to make it look like something is being done. Before Christmas, the group announced Twitch’s new policy. They recommended, you guessed it, censoring words.
Per tech news site Ars Technica, “As part of a crackdown on ‘sexually focused terms’ on its platform, Twitch says terms such as ‘simp,’ ‘incel,’ and ‘virgin’ will soon be banned when used as insults by streamers or chatters on the popular game-streaming service.” Let’s examine these words, which Twitch thinks are so ”sexually focused” as to be beyond mention.
“Incel” stands for “involuntary celibate.” It refers to an internet subculture defined by the bitter despondency of its members over their inability to get laid. Rather than take steps to remediate their lot, they build an analytic framework about why it is unfair and they should lash out. Several public killings have been attributed to “incel terrorism,” such as a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, and a 2018 vehicle attack in Canada. These are not to be minimized, though saying sexually frustrated young men with no prospects are a dangerous element seems like an old observation being given a new name.
“Simp,” I admit, I had to double-check the meaning of — despite spending way too much time online. Ars Technica seemed confused, too, quoting Urban Dictionary with a shrug: “The term simp (in re: ‘Someone who does way too much for a person they like’), meanwhile, is often used as generic trash talk rather than with any specific sexual connotation.”
You may recognize the word “virgin” from the airline or from the Madonna song “Like A Virgin,” which spent six weeks topping the charts in 1984. Or perhaps you recognize it from another Madonna who has been called the “Virgin Mary” since the late 2nd century.
As well as on specific words, there’s a series of bans on types of comments. For example, Ars Technica says that “the new guidelines explicitly prohibit repeated comments on ‘someone’s perceived attractiveness’ (positive or negative).” So, remember not to compliment your favorite gamer about his or her green hair or retro comic shirt.
Now, Twitch is at pains to specify it will be employing “contextual enforcement” of these policies. Beside that contextual enforcement actually sounds worse, what bothers me here is that Twitch is upholding a pretense that the presence of certain “problematic” ideas in certain spaces is a function of allowing certain words. This is bunk. If there is a great deal of harassment of an immature, sexually obsessed nature on this video game streaming platform frequented by users who skew young and male, it is unlikely to be the fault of the word “simp.” Yet, when it came under fire, Twitch empowered the word police. At some point, we will need to realize that Newspeak (that is, “content moderation policy”) doesn’t work as social engineering and that trying to make it work is wrong.
