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.