Twitch is putting an end to butt shaking and twerking emotes
Finally, all those little, stupid crew members of Among us can start shaking again on Twitch. CEO Dan Clancy announced changes to the platform’s community guidelines on Wednesday, allowing cute animated emotes involving characters shaking their butts and twerking on the platform.
Emotes help cultivate lively and active viewers in Twitch. Often, spamming emotes and using channel-specific icons in chat can be just as fun as consuming the content itself. Now the team is changing the rules for emote content to align with general community guidelines. This means: time to twerk.
“So in particular, butt shaking emotes – commonly called twerking, but we’ll just call them butt shaking – are now allowed under our guidelines,” Clancy said. Patch Notes livestream on Wednesday.
The banned emotes were never particularly graphic to begin with, impacting many simple cartoon drawings. Twitch users reported strict moderation in response to the emotes in the summer of 2021. But now those restrictions don’t apply. Polygon reached out to Twitch to ask about the change and a company representative responded with the following statement:
We want to clarify how emotes are reviewed for approval by our teams. Before today, the guidelines we used to review emote requests differed in some ways from our Community Guidelines. We realize this may have caused confusion as it was not always clear how we made approval decisions. Now we’ve brought our emote guidelines more in line with the rest of our Community Guidelines. We believe this step will help clarify our decision-making process for the community, something that is important to us.
Twitch users have already embraced the change with open cheeks. Popular memes – like a GIF where a crew member is from Among us shakes and bounces his butt – can return to the Twitch chat. Butt shaking has long been a popular format for emotes in general, so artists have responded by sharing art of various characters and other cute little drawings of characters shaking their butts. So if you are a fan of brutal art like this lusty KirbyWell, you’re in luck, because now you might be seeing plenty of it on Twitch.