The popular streaming platform Twitch is introducing a new account verification feature that allows streamers to have more control over their channels by requiring email and/or phone verification, with additional customization and situational restrictions.
This includes requiring all chatters to verify their accounts via email or mobile phone number, as well as providing content creators with additional customisation and situational restrictions options.
Following significant protests and outcry from the broader Twitch community against “hate raids” and botting targeting marginalized groups on the platform, Twitch announced in August that they would be rolling out a new “channel-level ban evasion detection and account verification improvements.”
Twitch has added a new chat verification feature. The said platform’s streamers will be able to enable email or mobile phone number verification for all chatters, with additional customisation and situation restrictions, according to Bussey, including:
If it’s the first time the users are chatting.
If a user’s account hasn’t been aged for a set amount of time (e.g. x minutes, hours, days, or weeks).
If the account only followed the streamer for a set amount of time (for example, the last x minutes, hours, days, or weeks).
Streamers will also be able to add exemptions for subscribers, VIPs, and mods, according to Bussey. You can see an example of how this new system will work in the screenshot below.
According to the accounts of many critics on Twitter and Reddit, this new feature has been well received by members of the Twitch community.
Twitch, according to one Twitter user, should “If you’re not at least affiliated, you won’t be able to host or raid. While this may help the new verification feature, it may also limit smaller creators’ ability to interact with and network with other streamers on the platform.”
Bussey proposed that Twitch include this as an option as a possible solution. While the majority of user feedback has been positive, a few have expressed reservations about whether this feature will reduce hate raids on the platform.
Supremagorious, a Reddit user, suggested that the only way for the feature to have any impact would be for Twitch to require phone verification indefinitely. “Without that, bot accounts will simply be created ahead of time by slapping a number or two on the viewer list from some Twitch presents stream or large stream,” they explained.
The new feature is currently in a “limited testing” phase and has not yet been rolled out worldwide. Nonetheless, this appears to be (at the very least) a step in the right direction.
We’ll do our best to keep you informed as more information about Twitch’s new feature rollout becomes available.
