Twitch won’t punish streamers for showing “combined chat” anymore

Multi-platform streamers running chat overlays from YouTube, Kick, or other services alongside their Twitch chat have been operating in a bit of a gray area for a while. That just got officially cleared up.

Twitch has stopped enforcing against streamers who display a combined chat, which was noted by streamer analyst Zach Bussey on X.

It’s part of a wider enforcement overhaul the platform rolled out on February 24, moving away from the old “one size fits all” punishment model.

Until now, even a minor violation meant losing access to all of Twitch: streaming, chatting, watching, everything. That changes today. Twitch announced a new targeted enforcement system where the restriction matches the specific rule you broke, rather than cutting you off from the entire platform.

Under the new system, minor violations while streaming result in a streaming suspension: you can’t go live and your channel chat gets temporarily disabled, but you can still watch other streams and browse normally. If the violation happens in chat, you get a chatting suspension instead. You can still stream your own content, and you can chat in your own channel, just not in anyone else’s.

In a blog post, Twitch pointed out that only 2% of active users have ever been suspended, and 90% of those never re-offend. The all-or-nothing approach, by Twitch’s own admission, was overkill for most situations.

Higher severity violations still carry heavier consequences. Those get both a streaming and chatting suspension at once, and the worst offenses remain grounds for an indefinite ban and full loss of access. There’s also an escalating penalty system where repeat violations in the same category within a set window (90 days, 1 year, or 2 years depending on the offense) lead to progressively longer suspensions each time.

Not everyone is convinced. A chunk of the community is already questioning whether Twitch will apply these rules evenly across all streamers, including the platform’s bigger names. It’s a fair concern, and one that no policy post can really answer upfront.

The system is live today, so we’ll have to wait and see how it actually holds up once more streamers start running into it in practice.