Is it safe? Analysis of Live Streams Targeted at Kids on Twitch.tv

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2025-01-31
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A number of recent studies have analyzed the exposure of kids to improper content (e.g., violence, sexual themes) on social media platforms. However, such studies are restricted mostly to YouTube. Our present goal is to contribute to such discussion by focusing on another platform very popular among the young audiences, namely Twitch.tv, a live video streaming and social media platform that has massive presence in the gaming world. To that end, we designed a crawler that uses the Twitch´s official API to periodically probe the platform for active streams with content which, based on the associated tags, explicitly target kids as viewers. We monitored the platform for one month, gathering a first of its kind dataset of live Twitch streams targeted at kids. Our analyses of the data revealed a number of streams that, despite explicitly targeting kids, have content (often games) improper to them. Even more, we found that, while Twitch follows one age classification system to categorize game streams as adequate to kids or not, inconsistencies across different classification systems reveal limitations of the platform that potentially put children in different regions of the world at risk of being exposed to content deemed improper.


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