Twitch aims to be a place where everyone can come together in shared, community experiences. This vision is threatened when people experience harmful rhetoric and abuse on Twitch. Twitch does not permit behavior that is motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, including behavior that promotes or encourages discrimination, denigration, harassment, or violence based on the following protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, color, caste, national origin, immigration status, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, serious medical condition, and veteran status. We also provide certain protections for age (details on which bullets apply called out below).

We define ‘protected groups’ as a subset of the population with a shared protected characteristic. Every Twitch user falls into multiple of these protected groups. Twitch affords every user globally equal protections under this policy, regardless of their particular characteristics, and we don’t make exceptions to these standards based on protected characteristics.

Content that is prohibited under our Hateful Conduct policy—regardless of whether it is intended to be hateful—includes, but is not limited to the following:

Promoting, glorifying, threatening, or advocating violence, physical harm, or death against individual(s) or groups on the basis of a protected characteristic, including age.
Using hateful slurs, either untargeted or directed towards another individual. We allow certain words or terms, which might otherwise violate our policy, to be used in an empowering way or as terms of endearment when such intent is clear. We also make exceptions for slurs in music—and singing along to music—as long as the song itself is not hateful and the slurs are not combined with other discriminating or denigrating content.
Posting, uploading, or otherwise sharing hateful images or symbols, including symbols of established hate groups and Nazi-related imagery.
Speech, imagery, or emote combinations that dehumanize or perpetuate negative stereotypes and/or memes.
Content that expresses inferiority based on a protected characteristic, including, but not limited to, statements related to physical, mental, and moral deficiencies.
Calls for subjugation, segregation or exclusion, including political, economic, and social exclusion/segregation, based on a protected characteristic, including age. We do, however, allow discussions on certain topics such as immigration policy, voting rights for non-citizens, and professional sports participation as long as the content is not directly denigrating based on a protected characteristic.
Content that encourages or supports the political or economic dominance of any race, ethnicity, or religious group, including support for white supremacist/nationalist ideologies. This does not include support for self-determination movements.
Expressions of contempt, hatred, or disgust based on a protected characteristic.
Mocking the event/victims or denying the occurrence of well-documented hate crimes, or denying the existence of documented acts of mass murder/genocide against a protected group.
Content that makes unfounded claims assigning blame to a protected group, or that otherwise intends to incite fear about a protected group as it relates to health and safety.
Encouraging the use of or generally endorsing sexual orientation conversion therapy.
Membership, support, or promotion of a hate group, including sharing hate group propaganda materials.
Creating accounts dedicated to hate, such as through abusive usernames.
In addition to the educational and satiric exceptions called out above, exceptions to these standards are made when sharing content from rated movies/TV or developer-generated content in non-prohibited video games in a way that is not directly discriminating or denigrating.

We do not make our list of slurs public so as not to enable or facilitate evasion of this policy. Further, we take context into account when evaluating whether use of a slur violates our policies.