New Twitch Feature Makes It Easier to Ban "Malicious" Users Across Channels

Twitch announced another safety feature recently that's intended to make it so that Twitch streamers can immediately identify and take action against users that have proven to be problematic over on other people's channels. This feature is called "Shared Ban Info" and consists of exactly what its name suggests – shared information regarding bans or similar punishments levied against problematic viewers. It's an optional feature, but it's one that'll potentially help proactively deal with what Twitch referred to as "malicious" users.

The Shared Ban Info security feature works by allowing Twitch content creators the opportunity to request ban information from other channels. Should the other content creator accept, it forms a two-way relationship where the two parties share with each other information about viewers they've banned.

Once that deal is done, you'll have a list of potentially problematic users that'll be flagged should they visit your channel. From there, content creators can either assign them the monitored or restricted attribute. The former means that those users can keep sending messages like normal (though you'll be notified when they're sending them) while restricted users will only have their messages shown to the content creator and the mods which is effectively a shadowban.

"Once a user is flagged, you can simply continue monitoring/restricting them, ban them, or change them back to trusted," Twitch said. "Flagged users' first chat messages are clearly marked with a red border and include details on which channel they are banned from. Their messages are also queued in the "Suspicious User Activity" Mod View widget for additional visibility."

As Twitch said in its blog post, this sharing of information is something that users were already doing anyway, so the tool created now is meant to help expedite and simplify that process. An FAQ associated with the announcement addressed questions about the feature such as why Twitch doesn't just outright ban users defined as "serial harassers." The Twitch team also said it'll be "working on future updates that make it easier to identify suspicious users," so expect more tools and features like this in the future.