Streamer Ninja Upset About Twitch Using His Former Channel For Explicit Content

Earlier this month, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced that he would be switching to Microsoft’s Mixer platform for his future streaming career. The exclusivity agreement was a big boon for Mixer, which has long-struggled with challenging Twitch’s Amazon-backed dominance, and theoretically took Twitch’s most popular streamer away from them. Since then, Twitch has been using Ninja’s username and channel to promote other streamers, which took an ugly turn when one streamer Twitch promoted began airing pornography on their channel. 

Putting aside that using Blevins’ 14.7 million-follower channel for advertising other streams seems somewhat petty, Twitch ended up recommending an account airing full-screen pornography with a streaming thumbnail on the page. Twitch then had to apologize to Blevins over the incident.

“The lewd content that appeared on the Ninja offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service,” Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said on Twitter. “We’ve permanently suspended the account in question. We have also suspended [recommending other channels on the channel] while we investigate how this content came to be promoted.”

For his part, Blevins posted a video tweet today upset about the issue, saying he had been trying to get the Twitch channel shutdown, implying that the service wasn’t acquiescing to his requests to close the channel down before this incident.

The problem adds to a fairly rough few months for Twitch in which Blevins has left, popular streamers got banned and unbanned, a streamer was criticized for abusing a pet, and other incidents.