Twitch backtracks after accidentally showing porn on Ninja’s old page

Enlarge / Ninja's defunct Twitch page, as it looked briefly this weekend (The explicit thumbnail in the upper left has been blurred by Ars Technica). (credit: Keemstar / Twitter)

Popular video game streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins isn't on Amazon's popular Twitch service anymore after Microsoft paid to move him to its competing Mixer earlier this month. But Ninja's Twitch page lives on without him, existing in a zombie form that ended up accidentally promoting a pornographic channel over the weekend.

Most defunct, offline streamer pages on Twitch revert to a kind of permanent archival form, where streamers can point their followers to new locations and viewers can access old streams and clips. After Ninja's Twitch departure, however, Twitch used that prime online real estate (which had over 14 million followers at its peak) to point users to other popular Fortnite streams on Twitch. "The Ninja you are looking for is in another castle" a header on the page read. "Check out these popular live channels."

This deviation didn't cause too much trouble for anyone until this weekend, when a stream featuring hardcore pornography somehow shot to the top of those Fortnite recommendations. Visitors to Ninja's old Twitch page this weekend were faced with an explicit thumbnail from the stream along with a Cyrillic description of its contents. After the explicit content promotion was noticed, Twitch quickly reverted Ninja's page the standard archival mode, as normal.

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