Twitch, the live streaming platform, has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. The company has been accused of deleting inactive accounts, which some users say is a way to silence dissent. The issue came to light after a user by the name of Emmalee Rice tweeted about her account being deleted without warning. “Just got my twitch account deleted for no reason,” she wrote. “I’ve been an inactive user for over 6 months.” Many other users have chimed in with their own stories of having their accounts deleted without warning or explanation. Some say they’ve been inactive for months while others claim they’ve only gone inactive for a day or two. The issue has sparked outrage on social media and many users are calling on Twitch to explain itself. Some are even threatening to boycott the platform until it changes its policy. So far, Twitch hasn’t responded to any of the allegations made against it. In fact, the only statement that’s come out of Twitch so far is this one from CEO Emmett Shear: “We take our responsibility to keep our community safe seriously and will investigate any reports of inappropriate behavior.” ..
I’ve honestly never heard of Twitch putting inactive accounts onto a lower status and then somehow disabling them. When they were ‘active’ they were active with their viewers but when they went inactive, there has been no change in my opinion from an administrative perspective. I’ve used Twitch time-delays when I was streaming so I can only verify that if your account became inactive after using a site such as those then it should still be saved within their database system. But you’ll need to wait 30 days for verification on whether or not your account will be deleted or leave you on low priority.
I’ve never heard of Twitch deleting an account after a certain period of time but if they did that, then it would be no different to any other paid service such as Netflix. So at the end of the month, once all costs have been calculated for their billing and support services and bandwidth, accounts that are deemed ‘low priority’ might probably get deleted from their database. And things like old unused donation accounts might get removed too because there’s little reason for them to hold onto information about people who donated long ago.
