Twitch has issued an apology after mistakenly allowing porn to be promoted under the now-dead channel page of their ex-star Ninja, who left to stream on Mixer at the start of August.
Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins published a video over the weekend underlining how disappointed and "disgusted" he was in his former streaming partner company for having allowed his kid-friendly but now-defunct channel to be used as a way to promote other streams, including very much not-kid-friendly ones.
Disgusted and so sorry. pic.twitter.com/gnUY5Kp52E
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019
After Ninja signed an exlusivity contract with Microsoft's fledgling streaming platform, Mixer, earlier this month Twitch were quick to remove his verification on the platform. However, in the 10 days since they had also decided to make the most of all those redundant bookmarks and browser address-bar autocompletes by providing a list of other live Fortnite streamers for visitors to Ninja's old channel page to go and check out in his now-permanent absence.
Unfortunately, as with most things decided by the algo, things went south very quickly and the recommended channels began hosting NSFW content.
In response to Ninja's anger about his young audience – and more importantly, his untarnishable Brand – being exposed to such eye-searing scenes, Twitch's CEO Emmett Shear issued an apology to the platform's former #1 on the world's apology-issuing service, Twitter.
2/ This helps all streamers as it creates new community connections. However, the lewd content that appeared on the @ninja offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service, and we’ve permanently suspended the account in question.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
"On a more personal note, I apologize want to apologize [sic] directly to @ninja that this happened," Shear continued after trying to justify using his dead channel to advertize on. "It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses."
