Twitch streamers may soon be able to share banlists with other channels

In the never-ending fight to make chat tolerable, Twitch is testing new safety tools that warn streamers and mods when a user has been banned in other channels. We caught a glimpse of the new vetting tool during a demo presentation of Guest Star, a new feature that lets users appear on streams as a video guest with the approval of the streamer.

As shared by Zach Bussey on Twitter, before a user is approved to be a guest star, mods can see if they've been flagged by Twitch as a “suspicious user” or “serial harasser.” This apparently reflects information already surfaced by Twitch, but the “shared ban” tag appears to be new.

Twitch did not go into detail about it, but the tag suggests that it'll be possible to share a list of your channel's user bans with other streamers.

While a shared ban list does seem like a natural next step for moderation, it's unclear if this feature will exist outside of the new Guest Star interface or how the ban information will be shared. Will Twitch automatically flag accounts banned on channels similar to yours, or do ban lists have to be manually shared between cooperating streamers?

It's a confusing way to debut a tool that could have a big effect on Twitch chat going forward. During the Guest Star demo, senior product manager Chris Miles brought up the feature, but glossed over it as if it wasn't entirely new. We've reached out to Twitch for clarification on the “shared ban” tag and will update this story if we learn more.