Twitch is no stranger to community backlash. This time the company was heavily criticized for an emote they introduced for their “Hispanic Heritage Month”.
Starting from September 15 to October 15 Twitch decided to highlight Hispanic streamers on their frontpage to “uplift” the international voices of Hispanics in the video game industry.
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month on Twitch.
Now through October 15, we’re spotlighting Hispanic and LatinX creators on Twitch with special front page streams, panel content, emote modifiers and more.
Join in: https://t.co/JrIxaIW41G pic.twitter.com/aulxcaG05a
— Twitch (@Twitch) September 15, 2020
Shortly after they launched their special page complete with special emotes for the month the streaming platform faced intense criticism. Not only the choice of featured streams (mainly english-speaking channels) but also the emote modifiers sparked outrage from the community.
Clearly based on Mexican stereotypes the choice of Emote Modifiers was at least poor in taste if not outright racist and faced a backlash from the larger community.
“Let’s celebrate latinos creators”
Continue to spotlight a bunch of english streams and a couple mexican emotes
Yeah, that’d do. pic.twitter.com/CtiDqcv1fp
— Fabry 🇨🇷 (@Fabry_CRC) September 15, 2020
Within three hours of the incident Twitch removed the emotes as they “missed the mark” and the streaming platform officially apologized for introducing them.
We launched these emote modifiers today as part of our celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month but we clearly missed the mark, and we apologize. These were not an appropriate representation of Hispanic and LatinX culture, and we’ve removed them.
— Twitch (@Twitch) September 15, 2020
This marks the second time within days that Twitch has come under fire for their decisions after their introduction of mid-roll ads prior.
Read more:
- Twitch introduces mid-roll ads during streams
- NZ Prime Minister with surprise Twitch Cameo
- The Top 10 Most Popular Games on Twitch in August
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