Twitch’s ‘Clips’ Feature Is Being Exploited by Child Predators

In the spring of 2023, a 12-year-old boy went live on Twitch, the popular livestreaming site owned by Amazon.com Inc., to eat a sandwich and play his French horn. Minutes later, about a dozen viewers joined him. Through Twitch’s chat, one asked him to do a somersault. Another requested that he show his muscles.

In response, the boy pulled his pants down. The whole thing ended in an instant, but one viewer, who was following over a hundred other Twitch accounts appearing to belong to children, used a feature called “clips” to capture the fleeting moment in a 20-second video. The resulting clip has since been viewed over ...