Twitch’s new ‘Shared Ban Info’ feature may help streamers team up to tackle toxicity

When a viewer makes inappropriate remarks in one channel’s chat, it’s not unfair to expect that they might be making the same kinds of posts in other channels.

For this reason, many content creators have collaborative systems for banning users from writing in their chats. Today, Twitch unveiled an expansion of its moderation tools that will help proliferate these joined efforts at mitigating toxicity and inappropriate behavior on the platform with the introduction of “Shared Ban Info.”

Though many content creators already group up and share information regarding people that they ban, this new system looks to streamline that process, making it easier to get rid of viewers that are out to harass streamers and other chatters.

On a streamer’s creator dashboard, under the settings tab, content creators can now use the “Moderation” page to look up other creators to share ban information with other streamers. By looking them up by name, creators can send a request to have shared ban info with them. Channels can only have a shared ban info relationship with a limit of 30 other channels.

Once both channels agree to having shared ban info, banned users from other channels will be flagged when they try to type in other channels that share ban info together. From there, each creator can handle the situation differently.

By default, anyone banned in a channel that you share ban info with will be restricted in the chat, meaning that only the creator and their moderators can see their posts. From there moderators can change their status by marking them as trusted, banning them, or keeping them restricted.

This new moderation tool is an expansion of Twitch’s work to mitigate hateful and inappropriate posting. Previously, the platform introduced a Ban Evasion Detection tool. This move by Twitch is a continued part of its attempt to listen to feedback by users as it dukes it out in the livestreaming marketplace with YouTube, which has recently landed some content creators that previously streamed on Twitch.