Community Guidelines

Last Revised on October 7, 2024

Introduction to Safety

Safety is the prerequisite for streamers, moderators, and all chat participants. Our goal is to nurture a community that empowers streamers to express themselves freely while offering a welcoming and enjoyable space for viewers. This space should be devoid of illegal, harmful, and negative interactions. To achieve this, we employ a comprehensive approach to safety. By "harm," we refer to actions that cause physical, emotional, social, or financial damage or loss to our users or to society at large.

Self-Destructive Behavior

Harming yourself, or discussing self-harm, can be dangerous for not only yourself but for viewers and those around you. We understand that streamers and viewers should be able to discuss sensitive topics related to self-harm or mental health, and we want Clutch to remain a safe space to do so. Anyone should be able to talk about their struggles, if they so choose. However, Clutch does not allow content that glorifies, promotes, or encourages self-harm. We also prohibit activity that may endanger your life, lead to your physical harm, or encourage others to engage in physically harmful behavior. We do not make exceptions for self-destructive behavior performed as a stunt or gag made in jest, or meant to entertain, when the behavior could reasonably be expected to cause physical injury to anyone on our service.

Violence, Threats and Terrorism

Acts and threats of violence are counterproductive to promoting a safe, inclusive, and friendly community. Violence is taken seriously and is considered a zero-tolerance violation, and all accounts associated with such activities will be indefinitely suspended.

Terrorism and violent extremism promote unlawful violence and spread messages of intolerance. Clutch does not allow content that depicts, glorifies, encourages, or supports terrorism, or violent extremist actors or acts. This includes threatening to or encouraging others to commit acts that would result in serious physical harm or significant property destruction.

Sexual Violence and Exploitation

Acts of sexual violence and exploitation are serious offenses. Content or activities that promote or threaten sexual violence or exploitation may be reported to law enforcement. Sexual violence and exploitation are not tolerated on Clutch and will result in immediate suspension of your account.

Youth Safety

Clutch prohibits any content or activity that endangers youth. This includes content that features or promotes child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and the sexual exploitation, sexual misconduct or grooming of youth (which is defined by this Policy as minors under 18). We report all illegal content or activity to the police, and the consequence for engaging in such activity or with such content is immediate and indefinite suspension.

Off-Service Conduct

For streamers and their viewers to build vibrant and dynamic communities, everyone must feel secure and protected. We believe that some off-service offenses committed by Clutch users can create a substantial safety risk to the Clutch community. As a result, Clutch enforces against certain severe offenses that occur off Clutch when committed by members of the Clutch community.

Users can contact the Clutch team to report cases of any abhorrent and impactful off-service abuses listed above. These reports go directly to the Policy.

Unauthorized Sharing of Private Information

Sharing someone else’s sensitive data without their permission can be both a distressing and potentially dangerous experience. Therefore, Clutch doesn’t allow users to reveal personal information of others on our service.

Hateful Conduct

Clutch 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 Clutch. Clutch 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, which are expressly noted in the examples.

We define 'protected groups' as a subset of the population with a shared protected characteristic. Every Clutch user falls into multiple of these protected groups. Clutch affords every user globally equal protections under this Policy.

Harassment

Harassment deters the growth of vibrant and diverse communities, prevents people from feeling safe on Clutch, and creates a gateway for more severe forms of harm and abuse. People experience harassment in different ways, including personal attacks, promotion of physical harm, and malicious brigading. Engaging in harassment will result in enforcement action taken against the relevant accounts.

Please keep in mind, we expect streamers to take the necessary steps to mitigate harassing content that appears on their stream or in their chat. We will not suspend broadcasters that we find to be acting in good-faith (including by using tools such as AutoMod, timeouts, and channel bans) to remove abuse appearing from third parties and external sources.

Sexual harassment is never acceptable, regardless of whether these comments are directed towards others on or off our services. Sexual harassment makes users feel uncomfortable, unsafe, and deters them from participating. We do not allow unwelcome sexual advances and solicitations, sexual objectification, or degrading attacks relating to a person’s perceived sexual practices, regardless of their gender.

Illegal Activity

For the safety of our community, we require users to respect all applicable local, national, and international laws while using our services. Any content or activity featuring, encouraging, offering, or soliciting illegal activity is prohibited and may be reported to law enforcement.

Intellectual Property Rights

In order to protect the intellectual property rights of others and comply with intellectual property laws, we do not allow users to share content on their Clutch channel that they do not own or otherwise have rights to share.

Any unauthorized content users share on Clutch violates our Terms of Service and is subject to removal. Multiple violations of our policies may lead to a permanent suspension of a user’s account. Rights holders may request that Clutch remove unauthorized content and/or issue penalties through the following processes:

Prohibited Content

Although we allow a variety of content to be shown on Clutch, content that features extreme violence or gore may be disturbing and distressing, especially if there is death, mutilation, or blood. Content that exclusively focuses on extreme or gratuitous gore and violence is prohibited. Additionally, websites that heavily feature adult content such as sexually explicit content, illegal content, or death and gore are prohibited.

To ensure content on Clutch is appropriate for diverse audiences, certain sexual content is prohibited, regardless of the medium used to create it (digital or non-digital). Users are prohibited from broadcasting, uploading, soliciting, promoting, offering, and linking to pornographic content.

In order to ensure that our community is safe and inclusive, inappropriate account names that violate our Community Guidelines are prohibited. We also recognize that an account’s username has more impact across our services than many other forms of content because they are persistent, cross-functional, and, in most cases, much more visible. Because of this, we have additional, higher standards for usernames based on reducing harm across our services.

Indefinite suspensions are issued for usernames and display names that constitute clear violations of our standard Community Guidelines, or that are typically representative of malicious and bad-faith behavior. For example, you may not create a username that includes [content warning]:

In instances where we believe users may be acting in good-faith, we will mandate a username or display name reset instead of indefinitely suspending the accounts.

Authenticity

Impersonation is a malicious practice that compromises trust in our service and can harm the target of impersonation. Content or activity meant to impersonate an individual or organization is prohibited, including impersonation of Clutch staff, celebrities, companies, or friends.

Spam and other deceptive practices create a negative user experience, decrease trust in our service, and mislead viewers, creators, and advertisers. Any content or activity that disrupts, interrupts, harms, or otherwise violates the integrity of Clutch services or another user’s experience or devices is prohibited.

Circumventing our enforcement actions undermines the integrity of our service. For suspended users, any attempt to circumvent an account suspension or chat ban by using other accounts or identities will also result in an additional enforcement against your accounts, up to an indefinite suspension. For non-suspended Clutch streamers, you may react to a VOD or a livestream from another service of a suspended user, but you may not feature them on your stream as a guest (for example, streaming in the same room or using collaboration software to feature a suspended user as a guest, even in an ensemble).

Harmful Misinformation Actors

In order to reduce harm to our community and the public without undermining our streamers’ open dialogue with their communities, we prohibit harmful misinformation superspreaders who persistently share misinformation on or off of Clutch. We remove users whose online presence is dedicated to (1) persistently sharing (2) widely disproven and broadly shared (3) harmful misinformation topics.

This Policy is focused on Clutch users who persistently share harmful misinformation. It will not be applied to users based upon individual statements or discussions that occur on the channel. We will evaluate whether a user violates the Policy by assessing both their on-platform behavior as well as their off-platform behavior. You can report these actors by sending an email to us with the account name and any available supporting evidence.