Ninja 'disgusted' after Twitch accidentally promotes porn stream on his dormant channel

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He's trying to get his old channel taken down.

(Image credit: Ninja)

Update: Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch, has apologized to Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins for the appearance of a porn video on the streamer's offline Twitch page.

Ninja claimed he was the only streamer whose offline page was being used to promote other popular channels (see original story below), but Shear denied this, saying the platform was "experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline.

"However, the lewd content that appeared on the offline channel page grossly violates our terms of service, and we’ve permanently suspended the account in question," he said on Twitter. "We have also suspended these recommendations while we investigate how this content came to be promoted.

"On a more personal note, I...want to apologize directly to Ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses," he added.

Original story: 

Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins, who recently signed an exclusive streaming deal with Mixer, has said he's "disgusted" with Twitch for promoting a pornographic stream on his now-dormant channel. 

If you visit his Twitch page you won't find his old broadcasts: instead, you'll be presented with a list of popular live channels. This, he claims, hasn't happened to any other streamers, even ones that have left Twitch for a different platform. "They advertise other channels [on my channel]. They don't do this for anyone else that's offline by the way, just me, and there are also other streamers who have signed with other platforms whose channel still remains the same," he said in a video posted to Twitter.

This morning, a channel showing porn was one of the most-watched streams on the platform, attracting thousands of viewers before it was shut down by Twitch. The stream made it onto the list of recommendations on Ninja's channel, as shown in this image (NSFW, obviously).

Ninja posted a video on Twitter shortly after, apologizing to anybody that saw the recommendation.

"This is the line," he said. "I'm trying to get the whole channel taken down to begin with, or at least not promote other streamers on my brand, on my frigging profile. So for anyone who saw that...I apologize, and I'm sorry."

In a follow-up tweet, he said: "This wouldn't even have been an issue if they didn't use my channel to promote others in the first place."

Ninja's first week on Mixer went very well indeed: he currently sits just shy of 1.5 million subscribers.

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Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.