Executive summary

Twitch is a live streaming service built around interactive, real-time communities, where creators engage in a wide variety of activities, including video games, art, cooking, and other types of creative content.

At Twitch, we are committed to fostering a dynamic and inclusive environment that enables streamers to express themselves safely while ensuring a positive, engaging environment for viewers, free of illegal and harmful interactions. This starts with Twitch’s Community Guidelines, which balance user expression with community safety, and set the rules for the behaviour on Twitch. Developed in consultation with external safety, human rights, and policy experts, these guidelines are regularly reviewed and updated to reflect and respond to the community’s evolving needs.

We identify and address potential safety risks using a combination of automated detection, proactive human review, and user reporting. Our global Trust and Safety team reviews and evaluates content and accounts flagged by users as well as signals generated by our automated detection models. The speed at which we respond to user reports is critical given the live nature of Twitch, and in 2025, during the reporting period, we responded to 85% of reports in under 10 minutes and 96% of reports in under an hour. Twitch employs extensive human review to help ensure that enforcement actions remain accurate and fair for our community members. 

Twitch recognizes the risks posed by misinformation, and we believe that individuals who use online services to spread harmful misinformation at scale do not have a place in our community. We maintain a dedicated policy to address misinformation: our Harmful Misinformation Actor policy. This policy targets individuals whose online presence is dedicated to persistently sharing widely disproven and broadly circulated  misinformation that has the potential to cause real-world harm. These actors share three characteristics: their online presence—whether on or off Twitch—is dedicated to (1) persistently sharing (2) widely disproven and broadly shared (3) harmful misinformation topics, such as conspiracies that promote violence. We prohibit harmful misinformation actors who meet all three of these criteria since taken together they create the highest risk of harm, including the incitement of real-world harm. 

Our enforcement numbers under this policy are relatively low due to several factors.  First, the structure of Twitch makes coordinated misinformation campaigns difficult to sustain. It is extremely difficult for a new streamer to garner large numbers of concurrent viewers; it takes time to grow an audience on Twitch. Most Twitch content is also long-form and ephemeral.  Once a livestream ends, the content typically disappears or is only available in limited formats. The ephemeral nature of content on Twitch makes large-scale misinformation campaigns much more difficult to execute compared to other user-generated content video and social media services where content remains indefinitely and can be amplified more easily. Second, our policy focuses on individuals who persistently share harmful misinformation. Due to the long-form nature of Twitch’s content, we evaluate a streamer’s aggregated content rather than isolated statements within a longer piece of content. Finally, when the Harmful Misinformation Actor policy was introduced in 2022, we took swift enforcement action against accounts that posed a clear risk to our community. We believe enforcement of our policy since its introduction has been an effective deterrent to harmful misinformation actors; we have not seen significant numbers of such actors attempt to join our service.

Even if someone is not a Harmful Misinformation Actor, Twitch may still take enforcement action under other policies. For example, misinformation that targets specific communities may violate our Hateful Conduct or Harassment policies, and we take action on content that encourages others to engage in physically harmful behaviour under our Self-Destructive Behaviour policy.

In addition to misinformation, Twitch invests significant resources to ban bots, spammers, impersonators, and other types of bad actors that attempt to manipulate activity or evade enforcement on our service. We have automated and proactive detection systems that work in tandem with our reporting system to identify and remove bots, known bad actors, and those who are trying to evade a suspension or ban.

While misinformation is not currently prevalent on Twitch, we recognize the harm that this content can cause, particularly when it is related to civic processes and elections. Twitch maintains cross-functional coordination across Product, Policy, Operations Legal, Risk Management, and Content teams to review potential misinformation risks and respond if necessary. Our Trust & Safety team did not observe any misinformation-related—or hateful conduct, harassment, or violence-related—threats related to elections that took place during the reporting period.

We continuously refine our approach to safety, drawing on insights from experts and evolving trends in our community. Recognizing that the  prevalence of harmful misinformation can shift, we actively collaborate with industry, academia, and civil society to assess emerging risks and adjust  our strategies accordingly. Twitch is a signatory of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, fostering stronger cross-sector collaboration and information sharing. Additionally, we participate in a variety of global industry knowledge-sharing initiatives, including the New Zealand Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms (which also addresses disinformation), the EU Hate Speech Code, and the EU Internet Forum. Twitch also recently stepped into an at-large Operating Board seat for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), further supporting cross-industry coordination and information sharing on emerging online harms. 

The EU Code of Practice on Disinformation serves as a valuable mechanism for information sharing and collaboration that will help strengthen industry’s abilities to react quickly to the spread of misinformation. As a signatory, Twitch aims to make meaningful contributions while continuing to learn from expert organisations and industry peers. We are committed to combating misinformation on Twitch in an effective yet targeted manner that balances freedom of expression with keeping our communities safe.