On Twitch, Artifact Category is Contaminated with Porn, Mass Shootings

So this is an interesting little tidbit discovered by the peeps at PC Gamer.

Here’s the background: when Valve first launched their digital trading card game Artifact, it was met with scores of good reviews – and many people, including the peeps over at Twitch, assumed that it would be a much, much bigger deal than it actually was. With that expectation, Twitch actually gave Artifact its own category, and before long it was more-or-less completely abandoned, unwatched by fans, and in turn, unwatched by the moderators.

Which meant in the intervening weeks and months, players had been slipping decidedly non-Artifact based content onto the streaming platform under the Artifact category. Sometimes it was harmless trolling. Sometimes it was porn. And it would have been funny, except sometimes it was the f@#king New Zealand mosque massacre.

Anyway. People are only now figuring out this is happening, and Twitch has now issued a response:

"Over the weekend we became aware of a number of accounts targeting the Artifact game directory to share content that grossly violates our terms of service. Our investigations uncovered that the majority of accounts that shared and viewed the content were automated accounts. We are working with urgency to remove the offending content and suspend all accounts engaged in this behavior. In addition, we have temporarily suspended the ability for new creators to stream. We take these violations very seriously and are taking measures to prevent this kind of coordinated activity on our service in the future."

So the whole thing is a mess. Because this ‘meme’ has become so ambitious that now people are disguising their memes and porn between actual streams of Artifact. So the whole game category has basically become tainted with this toxicity, and it will probably be more work than it’s worth to clean it out.

But I don’t think anyone would mind if the whole thing was just scrapped. It’s just Artifact.