Twitch CEO Dan Clancy on Social Media, Content Moderation and AI | The CEO Series

Well, thank you.

I think social media has been a net negative. I think that is a fair call out, especially as you talk about childhood. Giving a phone, a cell phone, at 10, 11, 12 years old just is not the right thing to do.

No, we have very clear policies and you can't be, you know, spewing hate.

The thing we have to worry about is not AI. The thing we have to worry about is a human being that might be controlling the AI. You can't predict what's going to happen.

Great to be here.

So, Twitch is a live streaming platform. And for those who are familiar with YouTube or whatnot, that's all I'll use the word VOD, video on demand. The magic of live streaming is people are just being sort of authentic in who they are, right? And so, they go on and do all sorts of things. Twitch started as a gaming platform. Gaming is still huge on Twitch, but now people do they might cook, they might do music, they do a lot of what's called IRL or in real life where they go out on the street and they do stuff.

Yeah. I mean, the way to think of it, our sweet spot is probably in the 20s to lower 30s type of thing. It's definitely not like as funny as, I might call them kids, but they're not really kids, right? How did you become the CEO? If I go back in time, I was a computer science theater major as an undergrad. It's a little different. And I went to Duke undergrad and I graduated and I said, 'Oh, I'll use my computer science.' But I didn't feel like I really knew computer science. So I said, 'I'm got to get a PhD.' I came out and when you're getting your PhD, everyone says, 'Oh, you want to do research?' So then I wanted to go to some place to research. And I went to NASA and I quickly realized that, you know, I like building things. And so at NASA, I love the fact that we would build things for missions and do that. But anyway, fast forwarding to Twitch really. I've been mostly in the tech space. And then I joined Twitch like what six years ago now.

I stream myself when I became CEO. I joined Twitch to run product and engineering. And I became CEO a little over two years ago. And one of the things I started was I started streaming when I became CEO. I enjoy it. You know, I initially started it because I wanted to experience the product fully, but now I really do it because I enjoy it.

Well, thank you. Thank you. I don't think I want to give off the typical CEO vibe.

My vibe is when you hang out with me, I think it's more that you forget that I'm a tech executive and that's sort of the whole point that I don't think of myself as a tech executive and like so often we create these distance between people and when you hang out it's like oh he's just like hanging out with me.

So the way I think I'm a self diagnosed and I didn't think I had it till my kids who both identify as having it said no you definitely do dad and then like sometime in the last year I was reading more and I'm like textbook and the way I think of it is I hate the name because the name is disorder and it's not a disorder. It's a superpower. It allows my brain to process information quickly. I think that's one reason why I like streaming. I can be playing the piano and singing and reading chat at the same time and then I'm go, 'Oh, that's what happened while I'm still playing.' And I think it allows me to synthesize information quickly and so I think that the superpowers I get from it is what's led to my success.

It's been great. I mean, I don't think of myself an executive. I'll go stream and, you know, I'll get my average concurrent viewers will be a couple hundred or something like that, but I recognize the people the same people show up I experience the community and then I'll go out and when I'm at TwitchCon I'll go hang out with a lot of my interactions are with small streamers, medium-sized music streamers and all that. There are lots of challenges but at the same time I think it's like the best job I could imagine having.

As humans we kind of yearn for connection with other people at some level. Anti social media today is kind of antisocial sitting by yourself swiping isn't actually social also like curating posts overly so like overproducing essentially, and also you're just by yourself. And the thing that happens on Twitch is Twitch is designed so that people, the phrase I use is pull up a chair and stay for a while. So people find a streamer they like they may watch four to eight streamers in a week but since they come for extended periods of time the people that are watching kind of recognize each other and get to know each other and then the streamer gets to recognize them and that builds this sense of belonging and acceptance and that connection it's actually the foundation of the business. Two-thirds of the business it comes from people taking money out of their pocket to support the streamer. About a third is advertising.

Ah, bro, he didn't have to. Can I give that money back?

I think social media generally has been a net negative for society. I think overall I think that is a fair call out. I'm big believer in a lot of the stuff that especially as you talk about childhood and teen years and the impact that social media has. I think the idea that we allow phones in schools is like makes my brain hurt to think that. And I think we all experience this ourselves with, oh, the phone in our pocket and then to put that on a 13 or 14 and 15-year-old and a 16-year-old and then we also mimic it where they see us. It's not just social media, it's this attachment to the phone. So, I think sometimes we say social media, but really it's like this attachment to the phone and social media is part of it. But part of it is constantly being distracted. Even if I'm going to read the New York Times, I'm still not present.

Well, that's looping all social media together. And I think with any good thing, there can be bad things. I as opposed to it being isolating as you get with some of the social media where you're just looking at these images and pictures of idealized people. A Twitch stream, it's not this idealized image. They're just being themselves, right? And then you're building a real connection. But that being said, that doesn't mean, we're very serious that people under 13 should not use Twitch. And I'm very supportive of parents deciding, look, what's the right thing, for my children. Because I think it is a question as you're in the 13 to 16 range and all that. But I feel comfortable with where we're at because we do kind of take it very fairly seriously and I do think our platform is very different.

So it starts with a set of community guidelines. It says here this is what's allowed on Twitch and this is what's not allowed on Twitch. We have very clear policies that says look this isn't a platform for hate, harassment, things like that, so we put out the and certain other things in terms of like nudity or something like that it's like no you can't do that on our platform. We put it out there and then we have a process where when viewers see something they can flag it and report it. We also have automated techniques to detect other things. Certain things that lend itself to automated detection will use things that don't we have user reporting and then we have a team that basically looks at all the reports efforts to determine did they violate. And the tricky thing in this is then we need to figure out how to kind of get them to stay within the lines. The biggest challenge is there's always gray area and sometimes you give them a warning, sometimes you give them a brief suspension like 2 or 3 days and for more egregious and clear stuff then we give them longer suspensions and for the most egregious then we might indefinitely suspend them.

Yeah. Yeah. And luckily for the most, like 99%, in general the vast majority of community is not pushing near the limit.