Sometimes those messages were as simple as “Love your T-shirt.” It is, however, the internet, and kindness isn’t as easily monetized as hate. Twitch viewers have a long tradition of sending messages to streamers intended to get a rise out of them. In Twitch’s early days, some streamers assumed a dunk-tank approach to monetizing their game streams, reading out loud insults littered with expletives and slurs and reacting for the audience. Please drink bleach, love, WomanH8r666. Others simply laughed as the abuse waterfalled in. In 2014, Steven “Destiny” Bonnell received birthday messages littered with homophobic slurs and anti-Semitic comments. Since that time, more streamers have taken to banning certain words from tip alerts with the services’ profanity filters.
Unlike PayPal, Streamlabs and StreamElements aren’t just moving money, and neither takes a cut of donations. They are instead considered “donation management services,” says Will Partin, an analyst for Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute. “But they are in a real sense their own kind of platforms,” he says, due to their social element. “If a platform is software that connects parties—in this case, viewers and streamers—that is what the essence of their business is.”
Like most social media platforms, StreamElements has a moderation team that reviews reports about user agreement violations. It’s unclear whether it actively bans individuals who break its rules against “harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive” comments. Streamlabs did not respond to WIRED’s question about whether it has moderators, but it did note that it reviews accounts that users flag.
Although PayPal is more of a cut-and-dried paymen ..
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