It appears there was a bit of controversy between Twitch and Ninja over the weekend. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is one of the most famous streamers to use the Twitch streaming platform by playing Fortnite. However, Ninja recently left Twitch to exclusively stream on Mixer. Over the weekend, Twitch promoted a pornographic stream on his old Twitch channel. Ninja took to twitter and has responded saying he was “disgusted and so sorry.”
Previously, if users tried to check Ninja’s Twitch channel, they would be greeted with a message saying that unfortunately this ninja is in another castle. Twitch would also promote other Twitch streamers for those who were interested in finding someone else to watch. Then, on August 1th, users discovered that there was a channel showing porn. It appeared as one of the recommended channels for users!
Upon finding out what had happened, Ninja posted a video response on Twitter with the headline of “Disgusted and so sorry.”
Ninja has also said in the video, “I have no say in any of this stuff. This is the line, this is the straw. I’ve been trying to get the whole channel taken down to begin with, or at least not promote other streamers and other channels on my brand, on my friggin profile. So for anyone who saw that, I apologize and I’m sorry.”
Ninja’s wife and manager also took to Twitter saying, “Twitch is doing PR control right now but it seems their intent from the beginning was to try to kill Ninja brand. They say promoting other channels on his page wasn’t of ill-intent, but here is a Twitch co-founder saying RIP with a winky face to Tyler’s transition. Petty.”
The CEO of Twitch, Emmett Shear, has apologized and responded to the situation on Twitter with a few posts:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
When Ninja left Twitch to stream exclusively on Mixer, he left 14 million followers … He currently is at 1.5 million followers at Mixer. Teaming up with Mixer was supported by Loaded, Ninja’s management company responsible for overseeing key areas of his career, including sponsorships, media licensing, merchandising, book publishing, partnerships, appearances, and more — in close collaboration with Ninja’s legal counsel at Loeb & Loeb. Ninja will also attend broader gaming events and activations throughout the year in support of Mixer. Mixer is committed to providing a fun and welcoming community to all broadcasters across a variety of platforms including PC, consoles, and mobile — and Ninja invites his community to join in.
