Twitch Sues Troll Streamers Who Flooded Site With Violent Videos and Pornography (afr.com) 78
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Twitch Interactive, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon.com, has sued anonymous trolls who flooded the site last month with pornography, violent content and copyrighted movies and television shows...
Twitch says it works to remove offensive posts and ban the accounts of the users who post them, but that the videos quickly reappear, apparently posted by bots, while other bots work to drive users to the impermissible content. Twitch temporarily suspended new creators from streaming after a May 25 attack by trolls.
The company said that if it learns the identities of the anonymous streamers who have abused its terms of service -- named in the lawsuit as "John and Jane Does 1-100" -- it will ask the court to prohibit their using the platform and order them to pay restitution and damages.
Twitch says it works to remove offensive posts and ban the accounts of the users who post them, but that the videos quickly reappear, apparently posted by bots, while other bots work to drive users to the impermissible content. Twitch temporarily suspended new creators from streaming after a May 25 attack by trolls.
The company said that if it learns the identities of the anonymous streamers who have abused its terms of service -- named in the lawsuit as "John and Jane Does 1-100" -- it will ask the court to prohibit their using the platform and order them to pay restitution and damages.
Censorship (Score:1, Funny)
Muh conservative values!
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Shit only goes really downhill when you have the police beating the hell out of someone just because they literally said something illegal.
But i don't think this case in particular is another step into this direction.
Re: Censorship (Score:2)
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Does a movie with a sex scene shown at the AMC 24 multiplex in Walt Disney World [disneysprings.com] count as softcore porn?
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Twitch is a publisher, not a content platform though. As publisher, they are liable for the content on their site, and as such, can be much more stringent with enforcement of what is and isn't appropriate for their platform.
The problem with platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter is that they pretend to be platforms, and thus get protection from prosecution based on liability for user generated content. Trying to also get the benefits of being a publisher in those circumstances is dishonest and a per
Interesting to see who they can find (Score:3)
You would assume especially people with bots would be a bit too removed to uncover identity, but you can imagine a lot of kids doing the same thing for fun - they may well be easily determined, and have to face the restitution aspect.
I wonder what they consider restitution to be, or how they would calculate that for random off-topic videos. Maybe at least the bandwidth used to upload, storage, and then bandwidth used by whoever played them.
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Costs to deal with the problem, loss of revenue, loss of reputation.
"But, you honor, I don't bother to monitor what my kids are doing - how can I be held responsible?"
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You mean the bandwidth consumed by those who voluntarily clicked on said videos?
Yes but the point is that the kids uploaded something rude, and had Twiitch acting as a hosting site for content they didn't want to host...
I'd love to see how they're gonna make that shit stand in court.
I agree it may not be feasible to charge them for that when they are a site set up to stream content, but maybe the TOS covers that (if that will stand I have no idea). Not really sure myself, just trying to think of what they
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If I click on a link to see a video of someone playing a video game (I can't imagine why, but hypothetically), but Instead I see bad porn deliberately mislabeled by a pointy headed moron, it is not reasonable to claim that I freely chose to download bad porn. I chose to download a video game stream, I got the un-chosen porn anyway. A waste of my time and bandwidth. And since it didn't increase my opinion of the site, it wasted their bandwidth too.
Meanwhile, if too many such videos are gamed past the system,
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Since it is illegal to knowingly display porn or cause porn to be displayed where you know minors will be present, there is considerable legal issue here.
Paywalled (Score:5, Interesting)
From the featured article:
From the subscription offer landing page:
What alternative sources are available for those Slashdot users whose current subscription package happens not to include afr.com? Other sources found by searching Google for the article title [google.com] are mostly from Bloomberg, which is also a pay site. I found a mirror on The World News [theworldnews.net], but I don't know how long it will remain up. Polygon has an article by Cass Marshall about Twitch no longer accepting new streamers [polygon.com].
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I don't recommend paywalls
Neither do I but the Ad supported model was OK when it was 10% ads 90% article on dead tree version now its 90% ads to 10% article and they still want to paywall
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And in the dead tree versions there was never any risk of the ads hitting you in the face with a hammer.
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At least they were quiet and didn't jump about on the paper.
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Maybe, but them not being able to was also the reason why people put up with them. And them being able to is the reason why people use adblockers.
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And in the dead tree versions there was never any risk of the ads hitting you in the face with a hammer.
They were good rolled up as a behaviour modification device for young humans and spiders
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Most of the text of the article is in the Slashdot summary. What in the world are you whining about?
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If I was whining, it was about not being familiar with the background of this story prior to this lawsuit. Julia Alexander of The Verge [theverge.com] also covered Twitch closing to new streamers at the end of May, but Slashdot ran no story about it then.
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Thanks. The summary made it sound like these were spammers trying to make a buck, but TFA you posted makes it sound like trolls. It can be had to tell these days, they both use the same tactics.
Finally a reason to watch Twitch (Score:1)