The debate on Deepfake Porn misses the point
Breaking Twitch: A No-Go Theorem on Sexual Porn and the Impact on the Public Opinion of Female Streamers
The company isn’t doing this on a whim — as BuzzFeed News and NBC News reported last month, Twitch recently had its own deepfake scandal. On January 30th, Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing broadcasted a stream that featured the faces of many female streamers, including Pokimane, Cinderella, and Maya Higa. In a tearful apology stream, Atrioc admitted he visited a deepfake site out of “morbid curiosity” about the images. “I just clicked a fucking link at 2AM, and the morals didn’t catch up to me,” he said while promising never to do anything like that again.
These conversations don’t capture the point. They brush aside legitimate harm in favor of bad-faith arguments. Centering “real” versus “fake” diminishes the lasting impact these images have on the streamers and their careers. “We are hurting,” Blaire says. Every woman is being hurt by this.
Twitch does tend to clamp down on accounts sharing sexual images, even when they accidentally make their way into a livestream. Pokimane received a warning after opening PornHub in a browser tab and Atrioc was previously banned for showing a flaccid penis on screen. But Twitch’s previous stance on deepfakes was extremely limited: it only mentioned them in the context of “sharing negative doctored or artistic content to abuse or degrade another person.”
The company writes that even a brief glimpse of those images will be taken away and will result in an enforcement. If you have promoted, created or shared porn that is deep fake, that can result in an indefinite suspension on the first offense.
Twitch can reopen the Pandora: censorship bans on nudity-inducing content that isn’t real
It’s not clear if Twitch took any enforcement action against Atrioc at the time — the company didn’t immediately respond to a fact-check request — but the new policy makes it clear that at least some action would be taken.
Twitch did previously prohibit “broadcasting or uploading content that contains depictions of real nudity” and threatened instabans for “sexual violence and exploitation,” however.
She is giving up the fight because all of the lawyers have concluded that the deepfake porn site she is trying to harm doesn’t exist.
