Twitch streamers can block banned users from watching their stream

Twitch offers various tools to deal with harassment, but streamers couldn't stop pesky and rude users from watching their livestreams until now.

Twitch anti harassment feature | Twitch livestream ban | Twitch

Owned by Amazon, Twitch is one of the popular video game streaming services in the world with millions of daily viewers. (Image Source; Twitch)

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Twitch, one of the biggest video game streaming platforms is adding a new anti-harassment feature that lets streamers block banned users from watching their livestreams.

Announced in August this year, the new feature was recently spotted on the company’s support page with Twitch saying it was introduced in response to community feedback. While streamers on the platform can ban people from chats, there was no option to stop users from watching their stream.

It looks like Twitch has also integrated the new option into its existing block tools, meaning if a streamer bans a user from chat, they will automatically be unable to watch the stream as well. However, the bans are only effective if the user is logged in to their Twitch account. While they can browse the streamer’s VODs, clips and highlights, Twitch says it has plans to prevent banned users from doing so.

🛡️ Thanks to community feedback, we’ve started rolling out an option for streamers to prevent banned users from watching their livestreams. Streamers can turn on this feature in the Moderation settings section of their Creator Dashboard.

— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) October 11, 2023

Since the streaming platform doesn’t enforce IP blocking, banned users will still be able to watch streamers who have blocked them from incognito mode or by logging out from their accounts.

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The option to prevent banned users from viewing live streams can be found by navigating to the platform’s ‘Moderation Settings’ in the Creator Dashboard and turning on the ‘Stop banned users from viewing stream’ setting. Twitch says the feature is still rolling out to everyone, so some streamers might get it sooner than others.

Twitch is currently one of the most popular streaming services on the planet, but things may change down the line, with Twitch rivals like Kick offering creators the option to keep 95 per cent of their revenue and X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk testing a new live video game streaming feature.