My name is Angela Hession, and I’m the VP of Global Trust and Safety (T&S) at Twitch.

For one year I’ve been fortunate to lead the team whose primary goal is to keep Twitch safe and welcoming for everyone. Open dialogue with all of you is a massive part of how Twitch works, and T&S should be no exception. So, as we head into 2022, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the year we’ve had and recap some of the most important and useful safety updates of 2021. I also wanted to give you a sense of what you can expect from me and my team in the year ahead.

Before we dive in, it’s crucial to say that safety on Twitch is constantly evolving – we are on a journey. We will always be listening and improving; we will never be done. Over seven million Creators go live every month across the world, and that number continues to climb. This means our solutions need to work for all of them and their millions of unique communities. But, as 2021 showed us, there will always be highly motivated bad actors who work to spread hate and evade our protections. So even as we think and build at scale, we also need to consider these specific outliers who are set on causing harm on our service and others.

In the past 12 months, we launched some of the most powerful tools yet to help make Twitch as safe as possible for as many people as possible. We also introduced several landmark policies that help protect the community against new and evolving threats of all kinds.

However, in that same time, our community experienced some of the most vicious attacks ever seen against streamers — particularly streamers of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and military veterans. This kind of behavior has no place on Twitch and we know there’s more we can do to protect our community, which is what I want to talk about today.

Progress on Hate Raids

The targeted attacks known more widely as “hate raids” were unacceptable. No one should have to experience that kind of treatment on Twitch, or anywhere for that matter. As we’ve said before, these were orchestrated by highly determined bad actors, but their effort doesn’t excuse what happened, or how long it continued.

Bot attacks are rampant across the internet and don’t have an easy fix. We’ll likely never be able to eliminate them entirely, but several updates this year — including back-end sitewide tech and Creator tools like phone-verified chat — have cut down on their numbers significantly. This year we’ve proactively removed over 15 million bot accounts and that number continues to grow.

Our work in this space is not over. We’re continuing to work on sitewide proactive detection updates, as well as pursuing legal action against individuals who carried out many of the attacks. Your feedback around these raids has been an important factor in how we decide what to do next, so as always, keep it coming.

Now, let’s jump into some of the most important advancements from 2021 that affect your safety on Twitch.

Our updated Hateful Conduct and Harassment Policy

Implemented in January 2021, the updated Hateful Conduct, Harassment, and Sexual Harassment policy takes a much clearer and tougher stance on harmful behaviors — particularly ones aimed at women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. This includes clearer rules around encouraging doxxing or swatting, sending unsolicited sexual images, and much more. Making our stances more understandable and more thorough has made reporting more efficient, and has improved our ability to act more quickly, consistently and widely on reports.

An industry-first Off-Service Conduct Policy

I am particularly proud of the Off-Service Conduct Policy, as it was a novel approach within the industry.

Online communities are not silos. Many streamers and fans interact with each other on services other than Twitch, including social media. Unfortunately, the same is true for harassers. Harm on Twitch can follow community members to other services and vice versa.

With our Off-Service Conduct policy, we took the stance that we needed to do more to protect our community from harms happening off Twitch. Investigating off-service offenses takes an immense amount of resources and collaboration – we have much more limited access to verifiable data and information, and there are various legal complexities to navigate. That’s why we focused selectively on the most severe offenses that could compromise the physical safety of our community members when we launched the policy in April. We will continue to look for ways to improve on it as we learn.

New education, accountability, and feedback initiatives

This year, we also worked to put more important information and tools in your hands, while also holding ourselves more accountable. We released our first bi-annual Transparency Reports, in which we publicly share data on our safety progress, making ourselves accountable not just to the Twitch community but to other partners such as regulators, advertisers, and press. You can read our latest one here.

We also launched our Safety Center, a hub with information about all aspects of community safety on Twitch, which we’ve been regularly updating with blogs, help articles, and how-to videos. We’ve also hosted more Creator Camps to provide opportunities to engage with us directly on important topics.

We continued to partner with our Safety Advisory Council who provided valuable community and expert insights, and will be announcing an updated program in 2022 based on your feedback.

Launching Phone-verified Chat and Suspicious User Detection 

These are two of the most powerful tools to-date to help Creators and Mods protect their communities. Both were inspired by community feedback from UserVoice and took most of 2021 to develop, refine, and launch.

Phone Verified Chat lets you restrict chat privileges to only users who have a verified phone number on their account. For more details about how it works or how you can activate it on your channel, check out the blog.

Suspicious User Detection helps you detect and take action against bad actors who may be trying to evade channel-level bans. As one of our latest launches, we’d love to hear your feedback to help improve it going into 2022.

Trust and Safety in 2022

As I mentioned, safety is not an end state. There is so much more to come. We’ll continue to listen to and gather more of your feedback, roll out new policies and products, and share consistent updates around our progress.

As we look forward, I’m focused on four core goals:

• Deterring harmful behaviors
• Empowering communities through tools they can control
• Improving safety education and communication
• Finding ways to balance content that may not appeal to all audiences

One point of feedback we hear often is that you want more information. The honest and unfortunate reality is that we can’t always be specific because bad actors can and have used that transparency to attempt to thwart our efforts. Despite that fact, we agree we need to strike a better balance. You can’t create and build strong communities with confidence if you don’t trust that we’re working to keep you safe. It is a top priority to continue working to find the right spot in between.

Here’s a peek at some of what’s coming in 2022:

• Improvements to the user reporting and appeals process
• Updates to how Creators can use the information from Suspicious User Detection
• Updates to our sexual content policy
• Updates about our Safety Advisory Council, which are inspired by your feedback
• More and better educational content and programming on our Safety Center, live streams, and more

We may not be able to respond individually to every piece of feedback, but please know that my team and I are always reading and discussing it. To share your thoughts with us, please reach out through UserVoice .

Thank you for your time, your patience, and your trust. We’ll work even harder in 2022 to build upon that trust and make sure Twitch stays the best place online to build your community.