When streamer AestheticallyGeeky read the Dec. 13 announcement of new guidelines on Twitch, she was “excited.” In a blog post hidden alongside rules allowing creators to twerk, pole-dance, write on their breasts, and perform strip teases as long as they label their content mature, there were changes to artistic nudity. These changes allowed “fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender.”
So the 26-year-old Twitch NSFW artist booted up her stream to her 15 usual viewers and started drawing a woman topless, feeling like she was abiding by these new rules by labeling the stream as mature. When she switched over to the “Art” category on Twitch, she joined the ranks of dozens of other streamers who were also drawing nudes to thousands of viewers. Her viewership skyrocketed to over 150 people, many sending her messages like, “You’re drawing porn, that’s not allowed!”
And they were right. While live, she received a three-day suspension for “Adult Nudity,” according to an email verified by Passionfruit. Multiple other art streamers who tested the waters on Dec. 14 also received temporary suspensions for their work. (Twitch streamer PayMoneyWubby even claimed he received a seven-day suspension for just looking at the Arts section while it was full of NSFW content.)
Less than 48 hours after the initial announcement, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy released a follow-up blog post, writing, “We are rolling back the artistic nudity changes” and that “depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch.” The streamers who received suspensions did not have them lifted and had to serve out their sentence.
“This just absolutely solidifies that Twitch isn’t a good platform for artists, especially ones that want to draw artistic nudity,” AestheticallyGeeky told Passionfruit. “It honestly makes me feel like this site is a joke sometimes.”
The Poster Child
Twitch has notoriously been an unsafe place for NSFW artists, with vague rules that streamers sometimes don’t realize they are breaking. In older versions of the platform’s Community Guidelines, going back as far as 2018, they state that “artistic and educational nudity are not allowed.” More recently, the vague guidelines said that “certain sexual content is prohibited, regardless of the medium used to create it.” Former Twitch artists who regularly draw more promiscuous content moved over to sites like Picarto, a live-streaming platform for artists that allows creators to share mature or NSFW content.
Some V-Tubers, who stream avatars of themselves online, thought they could take advantage of this new artistic policy in creative ways. Though “augmented reality avatars” still had to abide by Twitch’s attire policies, some felt that non-moving versions were safe.
Marina, a trans creator with 24,000 followers who has been streaming Twitch for the past three years as a busty V-Tuber for an 18+ audience, told Passionfruit that she “thought the ToS changes were great” and “a welcome change to not only be able to draw and create nudity but to be able to watch and display nude art as well.”
And on that fateful Thursday evening stream, Marina said she was excited “to be able to showcase some of the nude art [she] had never been able to showcase” on stream before. She believed that art was “ToS compliant.” Her viewers witnessed her pushing the envelope, her avatar bobbing up and down topless, and showing off multiple nude figures, including pin-up art and a static version of her V-Tuber avatar. Right after she finished her stream, her account received a one-day suspension for “Inappropriate Attire” in an email confirmed by Passionfruit.
But that night, images of Marina’s stream started to go viral on social media, with content aggregators like Jake Lucky and Dexerto, positioning her as the poster child of the risque movement in front of millions of accounts. Some online felt that she pushed the envelope too far and deserved a permanent ban, while others willfully misgendered her. On Friday, she was dropped from her Glytch Energy sponsorship “with immediate effect.”
“’I’m sure the notoriety from my stream may have played a part in Twitch’s decision to revert the fictionalized nudity ToS changes,” Marina told Passionfruit. “’I wish this situation had been handled better, both by myself and by Twitch.”
After the backlash, on Friday, Marina apologized to artists and V-Tubers, writing on X, “I never meant to cause any harm, and I did genuinely believe after reading the TOS updates multiple times that I was ok to display fictionalized nudity on static art as long as I labeled correctly.” She also claimed that she would donate any money earned from the week’s streams to “NSFW artists.”
“I myself regret jumping on the ToS changes, despite my excitement,” Marina said. “I think it would have been better to wait and see how the greater community utilized the changes.”
Overall, every creator seems to have a different idea of how much sexual content should be allowed on the platform. As a variety V-Tuber with just a few hundred followers, streamer Juno told Passionfruit that the idea of non-sexual nudity on Twitch sounds appealing as a creative tool, but disagreed with how creators like Marina interpreted the rules. “Even under the new guidelines, it was against TOS, and to me, it felt disingenuous or like a willful misinterpretation of the new guidelines to cash in on their horny fanbases,” they said.
“I still think in theory it’s a good idea to allow some forms of nudity, or even to an extent sexual content. [Twitch] just needed to have more refined guidelines in practice,” Juno told Passionfruit.
Twitch’s Real Issue
Twitch has always been a platform that seems to act reactively to controversy, especially when it comes to nude content. In May 2021, after female streamers started streaming in pools and hot tubs to skirt around the site’s attire policy, Twitch created a whole section for them on the site so they wouldn’t clog up the more popular section “Just Chatting.”
Earlier this month, streamer Morgpie started streaming at an angle that made her look topless, with other creators joining in on the trend. Coincidentally, these new guideline changes followed suit — seemingly trying to appease the masses concerned about this kind of content with some clarity on its policies.
“They allow sexual content, but at the same time, they don’t,” Morgpie told Dexerto. “And I think that with the vagueness of the TOS, people are going to find loopholes regardless because they do allow sexual content and sexual themes on the site.”
But because Twitch is constantly trying to keep up with each new controversy, they keep jerking creators around with flip-flopping policies. It has made creators feel like they can’t follow the rules, even if they want to. And this pattern goes beyond Twitch NSFW policies.
In June, Twitch announced a series of new changes to advertising, prohibiting the size and nature of ads that would have effectively decimated branded content. After a few viral posts and top streamers threatening to leave the site, Twitch rescinded those rules within a day of announcing them, writing on X that the “branded content policy update was overly broad.”
When Twitch’s NSFW rule changes were first announced, many artists felt like this would be the opportunity for them to flex their creative muscles in front of a platform with more discoverability and audience than the alternatives. But in the aftermath of the second blog, as artists and V-Tubers on Twitch reconcile with their brief moment of chaotic freedom, they are left wondering if Twitch has their best interest at heart.
