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SAN FRANCISCO | The global game-streaming firm Twitch announced last week that it has added affirming tags for its users. The California-based high-tech company said that streamers will be able to select from over 350 new tags related to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health and more.
Twitch is the largest of all of the popular social video platforms for online video gamers, and which has also been recently acquired by Amazon. The company said that “these additions won’t change how tagging works and are completely optional. They simply give creators more choices.” The streams’ tags also denote categories such as languages, geographic areas, in addition to newly added gender, sexual orientation, race and nationality categories.
The game streaming platform is nearly 70% adolescents and young adults ages 13 to 34 according to independent Twitch Tracker website’s data analysis and research.
According to Twitch Tracker, the streaming platform’s users engage in between 68 million to 73 million hours of streaming video each day.
Twitch noted that, “We’d like to thank our trans community for originally requesting the ‘transgender’ tag, and for their passion and persistence in pursuit of that request. This has been one of the most popular requests we’ve heard, and the simple truth is that we should have done this sooner.”
The streaming platform’s actions are following a current trend by social media platforms to be more inclusive. Earlier this month, Instagram rolled out a new feature for its platform users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia that allows its users to select their preferred profile pronoun from he/him, she/her and they/them. Once selected, the pronoun preference will appear in small gray letters next to their username.
The change by Twitch comes at a time when trans youth in the U.S. are under legislative attack in over 30 states, which attempts to ban trans youth from participating in intermural and intramural sports at a secondary and collegiate level.
The company acknowledged that its LGBTQIA+ tag ‘began as an experiment a few years ago and stayed based on overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community.’ But it also acknowledged that it needed to be more expansive in affirming categories, “we understand that, as comprehensive as we have tried to be, we will inevitably miss tags that our community is looking for.”
“We’ve partnered with several independent, third-party organizations such as GLAAD, The Trevor Project, AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and other experts focused on the progress of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and marginalized communities. And finally, we reached out to members of the Twitch community for their feedback,” the company wrote.
The company also stressed that it was mindful of its user’s online safety.
“Our hope is that these new tags help every community, but especially those that are underrepresented, grow and thrive. As with any means of discovery, there are bad actors who may use the ability to find streams for malicious purposes. Users that utilize these tags as a means to harass those displaying the tags will be subject to enforcement of our Hateful Conduct and Harassment Policy.”
