Twitch has a cockfighting problem and is struggling to stop the streams of the violent content

• Cockfighting competitions in the Philipines have been streaming on Twitch.
• Though the streaming site tries to take them down quickly, more pop up in their place.
• The streams are disturbing and graphic, presumably Twitch's Terms of Service.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Livestreams of cockfighting matches, wherein roosters aggressively fight each other, in the Philippines are being broadcast on Twitch.

Cockfighting is illegal in every US state and banned in many countries, but remains very popular in the Philippines. The regulated matches are known as sabong in the Southeast Asian nation.

While unregulated, illegal cockfighting is an issue in the Philippines, the competitions streamed on Twitch appear to be legal and widely publicized events. Many of these fights are streamed live on other websites before making their way to Twitch, where they are viewed by hundreds of people before the platform removes them.

Insider identified multiple channels streaming a cockfighting competition in the Philippines on Thursday morning. These zero-follower accounts have no descriptions, an empty chat room, and no other streams. One channel streamed to a maximum of 280 viewers for one-hour-and-45-minutes before it was taken down. A dozen other channels appeared over the course of the day, with some staying live for under an hour before being banned with under 100 viewers.

In traditional cockfighting, roosters fight to the death. Some cockfighting matches Insider viewed on Twitch ended this way.

"Acts and threats of violence," as well as "extreme violence, gore, and other obscene conduct," are suspendable offenses under Twitch's Community Guidelines.

Twitch did not immediately return a request for comment.

Twitch is playing whack-a-mole with cockfighting streams

On Wednesday night, a Reddit user compiled a post of over a dozen different channels on Twitch that were broadcasting these fights. According to the post, the streams "had been happening in Twitch's unlisted section for multiple months with up to 12+ hour streams and up to 500+ viewers."

As the Reddit thread started to get upvoted, the channels showcasing the content started to get banned, but more started to pop up in their place. By the end of the night, every channel mentioned in the thread had been removed.

Still, as of Thursday morning, the problem persists. New streams with names that used "sabong" in their titles were taken down fairly quickly, but a stream with a name less directly tied to the practice itself stayed up for three hours.

These channels exist in the unlisted sections of Twitch, alongside bootleg streams of movies, soccer matches, and TV shows that have yet to be picked up by the site's automatic flagging system. Since there is no cockfighting-dedicated game category on the platform, users cannot stumble on the streams accidentally. But the matches are searchable by name if someone knows where to look.

One popular cockfighting event called "8-cock derby" features over 432 fights, with the winner of the event getting 20 million pesos, which translates to a little over $400,000. In the fights, two men bring out their roosters, who have single-edged blades attached to their feet, and introduce them to each other before a referee places them in the middle of the ring. These two birds then stab, peck, and fling feathers as announcers, switching between English and Filpino, describe the action.

When the animals lose interest or become too tired from the combat, the referee picks them both up, and then places them back down.

When one rooster is slaughtered, a winner is declared, and the discarded feathers on the stage are swept away. Advertisements for betting sites for "e-sabong," cars, chicken coop cleaners, and air purifiers appear on-screen in between matches during these streams.

Sabong betting is legal in the Philippines and is a "billion dollar industry" in the country, according to a government website.

Like moderation on other social-media platforms, tracking the content on Twitch, where nine million users streamed in February alone, according to TwitchTracker, is difficult. The platform uses automated moderation tools and a team of human moderators to comb through reports and identify questionable content, but some content - unlisted streams in particular, like cockfighting - slips through the cracks.

In 2019, a man in Halle, Germany, used Twitch to livestream himself killing two people outside of a synagogue. Thousands of people viewed the stream of the deadly shooting before Twitch took it down, The New York Times reported at the time. Similar to the cockfighting content, that stream was unlisted on the platform.