Twitch is continuing to build prevention measures against child predators on its platform, and because its existing policy prohibits children under the age of 13 from using Twitch, along with other measures to keep children under 13 safely away from the site, the "vulnerable accounts" The policy has been updated to include mandatory phone verification for what is referred to as.

"Keeping people safe online requires a constantly evolving approach. While this applies to Twitch's overall approach to safety, it is especially true for topics like child predation, where the potential harm is so great that it is hard to put into words," Twitch said in today's update.

The update comes two months after Twitch first highlighted the methods it uses to combat predation. The change was made in response to a Bloomberg report in September that investigated the egregious ways in which child predators engage with the site to watch and manipulate children who are live-streaming, despite Twitch's technical ban on use by those under 13. Twitch's rules allow children between the ages of 14 and 17 to stream and create accounts on the site.

The Bloomberg report noted numerous instances of dozens to hundreds of viewers monitoring underage children and encouraging them to perform various tasks and acts in chat rooms. Bloomberg was able to identify 1,976 accounts that were following numerous children through researchers, and the report stated that the site found even more accounts that were not cataloged by researchers.

At the time, Twitch said it would "continue to aggressively expand its staff, technology, industry relationships, and internal processes" to prevent children under 13 from using the site and to prevent exploitation by predators who slip through the cracks. The platform is currently providing further explanation of what it is doing to prevent the problem from spreading.

Twitch clarified that "there is no single solution to prevent predation," adding that it cannot share all of its methods "to avoid giving bad actors information they can use to circumvent our efforts." Going forward, however, the company will implement mandatory phone verification "before potentially vulnerable accounts can live-stream," and will also block users who have been suspended in the past for being underage from creating new accounts.Twitch also said that staff will review reports Twitch also stated that it is "continuing to improve the moderation technology" used by its staff to verify reports.

The default privacy settings for whispers have been changed, certain search terms for searching the stream have been blocked, and Twitch has acquired the Spirit AI, a language processing artificial intelligence, "to detect any kind of harm in written text on Twitch It is helping to "build a more subtle classifier. All of these changes have occurred in the past two months, and the site continues to work on preventative measures.

Twitch classifies child looting as "imminent harm," which falls under one of the site's highest priority threat categories.Twitch states that "collaboration is key," and encourages anyone with information about this malicious activity on Twitch to share it so that appropriate action to share information about this malicious activity on Twitch so that appropriate action can be taken.