Under Twitch moderation settings for streamers, there’s a few options to prevent hate raids, botting, and general nastiness in your Twitch chat while streaming. One of those options is an account verification requirement. Generally speaking, this will disallow any banned accounts created with a particular email from chatting in your stream. Twitch’s specific policy language says as follows:
If a phone-verified or email-verified account is suspended site-wide or banned at the channel level, all accounts tied to that number or email will also be suspended and/or channel-banned. You also won’t be able to use that phone number/email to verify additional accounts if it is already tied to a suspended account.
— Twitch Chat Verification Settings Page1
This is pretty good! It gives creators control over their chats and makes it easy for them to prevent newly created spam accounts from causing problems. However it is FAR from perfect, and has a very blatant issue that Twitch refuses to correct.
Types of verification
Twitch has two types of account verification:
- Email Verification
- Phone Verification
That’s it. There’s no other options here. Email Verification is required to make an account at all, because Twitch sends information to the Email you use after you sign up. This leaves Phone Verification as the only real option for streamers who want to restrict their chats to Verified accounts. This is where issues with the verification system arise.
Requirements for Affiliate
Twitch has a different set of requirements for affiliate streamers than it does normal users, aside from payout information. You are also required to set up 2FA for your account, either via SMS verification (very bad) or you can use a 2FA app like Authy. So, I have hardware 2FA set up on my account, on top of having a linked bank account for Affiliate payouts. Twitch has multiple ways to identify my account, all without having my phone number.
The problem at hand
This is where verification problems arise. The Twitch Affiliate requirements do not mark you as a verified Twitch account. This means, even as a streamer bringing revenue in for Twitch, you are unable to chat in any other streamer’s channel, should they require verification for their chat. The ONLY way to fix this currently is to provide Twitch with your phone number. As you can imagine, I’m not very inclined to do this. An easy solution would be for Twitch to allow app/hardware 2FA as a valid verification option for an account, but they have not up to this point, so I see no reason to think they will do this in the future.