Twitch Uses Ninja's Old Channel to Promote Porn

So, internet superstar Ninja recently signed an exclusivity deal with Microsoft to abandon Twitch, the most popular streaming site on the internet, and instead stream only on Mixer, which is most decidedly not. He’s had a plethora of success on the new platform so far, raking in over a million viewers in a very short time, but while Twitch has wished him well in his adventure, they also aren’t about to let him get away from them completely. There are still a lot of people searching for “Ninja” on their platform, after all, and they’re not about to re-direct them to a competitor’s website.

So what they’ve done instead is use his now-dead channel to promote the streams of other popular Twitchers. Which makes sense from a business perspective, but when you consider that Ninja is the only streamer that got that treatment when he left the site, it becomes a little sketchy.

…And then it became way sketchy when it was discovered that one of the streams being promoted on Ninja’s old Twitch page was a porn stream.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a man who lives and dies by the value of his brand, this did not go over very well.
 

"This is the line, this is the straw. I'm trying to get the whole channel taken down to begin with, or at least not promote other streamers on my brand, on my frigging profile. So for anyone who saw that...I apologize, and I'm sorry.

This wouldn't even have been an issue if they didn't use my channel to promote others in the first place..."

 
Twitch, obviously, apologized.
 

“The lewd content that appeared on the offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service, and we’ve permanently suspended the account in question. We have also suspended these recommendations while we investigate how this content came to be promoted. On a more personal note, I... want to apologize directly to Ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses."

Ninja’s page is still up on Twitch, so clearly the former Twitch Star hasn’t gotten his way just yet. But he’s got a pretty strong ground to push things to court if he needs to – and I suspect Twitch will fold before that time comes.

And yeah, I know, I’m also kind of tired about talking about Ninja, but I’ll be danged if I don’t enjoy this drama.