The live-streaming platform Twitch is endangering children by allowing them to “interact with adult strangers and donate money” but without parental consent or supervision, according to research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics conference.
A “significant proportion” of teenage users on Twitch are “willing to reveal personal information despite having no knowledge of who might be listening,” the researchers said, in a statement released before the event.
This makes the Amazon-owned platform a “predator paradise,” according to the researchers, who looked into the activities of 100 Twitch streamers with 1.7 million followers, finding that they provided their names 47% of the time and shared their location 50% of the time/
Viewers were able to donate money to 37% of streamers, the researchers found. “Discussions contained personal details 11% of the time, notably including streamers trying on outfits for viewers and discussing identifiable locations they frequent,” they said, noting that it took between 12 seconds and just under 5 minutes to find minors in each game category.
Ruth Milanaik, the lead researcher, said parents “need to supervise all interactions on this platform to best protect their child.”
Fiona Dubrosa, visiting scholar at Cohen’s Children Medical Center, questioned the format of kids being able to receive donations on the platform, which has around 35 million daily users and 7 million live-streamers a month.
Twitch declined to comment on the research.
The platform’s parental controls allow a father or mother to make protected changes to the privacy settings of accounts, which come with automated features designed to identify predatory behaviour.
The default setting is that accounts can’t accept direct messages (“whispers”) from strangers, Twitch says. Parents can contact Twitch directly at privacy@twitch.tv to have their child’s account closed and personal data deleted.
In 2022, Twitch announced a crackdown on accounts belonging to users under the minimum age of 13 after Bloomberg reported that 270,000 minors were potential targets for alleged predators.
Earlier in October Twitch announced a feature to make sure blocking stops a user from viewing any stream by a user who banned them.
