Recent Developments of TOS Actions Taken

[DumdogsWorld]

This is one of those kinds of things where I hate both sides. The guy was clearly toxic, but Square Enix crossed a risky line to punish him.

Not sure that I would defend either stance in this situation, to be honest.

[Risvertasashi]

The guy was clearly toxic, but Square Enix crossed a risky line to punish him.

It's a fair point. It's probably the death/rape/etc threats (from the world first ultimate clears, not this incident) that opened pandora's box. That was out of game too but since SE responded to that, I think that is why they now respond to some reports about behavior connected to but not necessarily entirely within the game.

People, players, who take an interaction a streamer has and harass on their own are doing just that: A streamer can't control their base anymore than I can, say, control what dumb things my friends end up doing that get them into a bad situation. (Which is to say, is a different context than a streamer advocating for people to go and harass x, y or z person, but that's not something that happened in the highlighted case, nor is it something that happens in any cases I've seen -- every streamer I've seen usually advocates to not do that. But at the end of the day, they don't literally control the individual people watching, nor do they have physical control over their keyboards.)

While it's true they don't control their viewers, broadcasters do have a certain amount of liability about what they broadcast - and this extends into legal territory, not just SE's/Twitch's ToS. (And, you know - I know this was just hurling insults and very unlikely to escalate - but if it did escalate thanks to some dumb viewer, SE and Twitch could also potentially share some liability if it were shown they had reports they didn't act on.)

There's a reason both big name TV broadcasters will blur faces, and content creators on youtube/twitch will often anonymize names of people that appear on their content. "I don't control the viewers" isn't a free pass.

Even then, going after a streamer who made fun of someone playing poorly is a less important thing to be concerned about than, say, all the advertised Discords in PF that're RMT selling things.

Yeah, I do wish they'd do more about the blatant RMT too...

[Alaray]

While it's true they don't control their viewers, broadcasters do have a certain amount of liability about what they broadcast - and this extends into legal territory, not just SE's/Twitch's ToS. (And, you know - I know this was just hurling insults and very unlikely to escalate - but if it did escalate thanks to some dumb viewer, SE and Twitch could also potentially share some liability if it were shown they had reports they didn't act on.)

It's a bit different when it's not a real life identity (which you can be banned for having on your stream of someone who didn't give permission), but even if a streamer went through all the steps they could to minimize the information, people can still find the information extremely easily -- namely, just going to FFlogs and looking up the parse from the encounter (that someone else in the party may have uploaded). While yes mitigating the possibility is good practice, it doesn't 100% solve the issue of people taking things into their own hands. And, in the latter case, the people who are taking actions into their own hands and actively going after a player, are the people who should be actioned.

[Risvertasashi]

It's a bit different when it's not a real life identity (which you can be banned for having on your stream of someone who didn't give permission), but even if a streamer went through all the steps they could to minimize the information, people can still find the information extremely easily -- namely, just going to FFlogs and looking up the parse from the encounter (that someone else in the party may have uploaded). While yes mitigating the possibility is good practice, it doesn't 100% solve the issue of people taking things into their own hands. And, in the latter case, the people who are taking actions into their own hands and actively going after a player, are the people who should be actioned.

You are right. It's shared responsibility, not 100% on either person.

That said, when a streamer has setup a special scene in their broadcast software that enlarges the insult target's name and draws special attention with extra animation and sounds... well, let's just say this isn't what I would call one of the very grey area cases? It's hard to not see that as encouraging the behavior, at least a little bit.

It would be a very different story if he only showed initials or blurred the name or similar. If someone is really determined to find out who that was, they could yes, but then the broadcaster would have done what they can to mitigate it over the medium they control. The broadcaster doesn't control FF logs, of course.

Also if the broadcaster had just kicked, blacklisted, and moved on, it'd have been a nonissue.