Ninja earns apology from Twitch CEO after old channel was used to promote pornography
Ninja may have left Twitch for Mixer, but something unexpected and not appropriate happened with his old channel. Basically, the now-abandoned channel that shot him to Fortnite streaming fame was being used to promote unfiltered porn and other streamers. Emmett Shear, Twitch’s CEO, issued an apology to Tyler “Ninja” Blevins along with the many Twitch users. When Ninja left, the channel began recommending and promoting other channels to check out, one of which included the aforementioned unfiltered content. Now how could this happen?
According to Shear, this occurred while Twitch was trying out a new feature that will recommend other channels to follow once a streamer has left the platform (gone offline). It was an unexpected occurrence and was simply meant to help bring new viewers to other streamers’ pages. He went on to Twitter to further explain the incident and let everyone know the situation has been dealt with. Twitch has also stopped this new experiment while they clearly work out some of the bugs. The account that was promoting inappropriate content was also suspended for good.
1/ Our community comes to Twitch looking for live content. To help ensure they find great, live channels we’ve been experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
Ninja’s reaction
Before Shear issued the public apology, Ninja had gone on Twitter himself to apologize to his many fans and viewers. He said he was “disgusted and so sorry” for what happened with his former channel. He hadn’t expected that his channel would be used to promote other channels. A lot of his content was also removed. Ninja had said he was working with his team to now get his entire channel removed.
My team and I have made sure the transition went super smooth, [was] super professional.We haven’t said anything bad or negative about Twitch, obviously, because there really hadn’t been any reason to.
Disgusted and so sorry. pic.twitter.com/gnUY5Kp52E
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019
Since this all went public Twitch has restored Ninja’s old channel back to the way it was before, and Shear made his apology. Hopefully, we don’t see anything like this happening again.
4/ On a more personal note, I apologize want to apologize directly to @ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
What do you think about this strange situation?
