Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has apologized directly to streaming star Ninja for porn being promoted on his dormant account on the platform.
“On a more personal note, I apologize want to apologize directly to @ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses,” Shear wrote Sunday night after Ninja released a video saying he had ignored “little jabs” from the company but was now speaking out against a porn stream being advertised on his channel.
“This wouldn’t even have been an issue if they didn’t use my channel to promote others in the first place…” the famed “Fortnight” gamer added in a tweet.
A Twitch representative said the account broadcasting porn has been permanently suspended.
Earlier this month, Ninja absconded from Twitch and joined Mixer in a widely-publicized jump from streaming platform to streaming platform, launching Mixer to the top of the app store and acquiring 1 million Mixer followers in a matter of days. During that same time, Twitch was “experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline,” according to Shear.
“Our community comes to Twitch looking for live content. To help ensure they find great, live channels we’ve been experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline,” he wrote Sunday, continuing, “This helps all streamers as it creates new community connections. However, the lewd content that appeared on the @ninja 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,” he added.
“Twitch has now reverted my channel back to how an offline page should look. Thank you,” Ninja wrote.