Twitch filed a lawsuit late last week against two people on its own platform for running automated hate and harassment campaigns.<\/p>\n
The harassment, often targeted at Black and LGBTQ streamers, manifests in a unique Twitch phenomenon as a \u201chate raid.\u201d On Twitch, creators regularly point viewers toward another friendly account after their stream concludes to boost their audiences, a practice known as a \u201craid.\u201d Hate raids invert that formula, sending swarms of bots to harass streamers who have inadequate tools at their disposal to block the influx of abuse.<\/p>\n
\nStreamers are boycotting Twitch today to protest the platform\u2019s lack of action on \u2018hate raids\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
The hate raids leverage Twitch\u2019s new tagging system, which many transgender users had requested to make it easier to build community and to discover content that resonates. In May, Twitch added more than 350 new tags to help viewers sort streams by \u201cgender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more.\u201d Accounts spreading abuse now use those tags to target racist, sexist, transphobic and homophobic harassment toward streamers, another unfortunate misuse of a tool explicitly designed to give creators a boost.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019ve seen a lot of conversation about botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalized creators. You\u2019re asking us to do better, and we know we need to do more to address these issues. That includes an open and ongoing dialogue about creator safety.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Twitch (@Twitch) August 11, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
In the suit, Twitch described hate raiders as \u201chighly motivated\u201d malicious individuals who improvise new ways to circumvent the platform\u2019s terms of service. Twitch named two users, \u201cCruzzControl\u201d and \u201cCreatineOverdose,\u201d in the suit but the company was unable to obtain their legal names. The users are based in the Netherlands and Austria, respectively, and their activity began in August of this year. Twitch alleges that CruzzControl alone has been linked to 3,000 bot accounts involved in hate raids.<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s possible that Twitch won\u2019t be able to identify the real identities of individuals behind the recent harassment campaigns, the lawsuit could act as a deterrent for other accounts directing waves of abuse on the streaming platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we have identified and banned thousands of accounts over the past weeks, these actors continue to work hard on creative ways to circumvent our improvements, and show no intention of stopping,\u201d the lawsuit reads. \u201cWe hope this Complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Complaint is by no means the only action we\u2019ve taken to address targeted attacks, nor will it be the last,\u201d a Twitch spokesperson told TechCrunch. \u201cOur teams have been working around the clock to update our proactive detection systems, address new behaviors as they emerge, and finalize new proactive, channel-level safety tools that we\u2019ve been developing for months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prior to Twitch\u2019s legal action, some Twitch creators organized #ADayOffTwitch<\/a> to protest the company\u2019s failure to offer solutions for users targeted by hate raids. People participating in the protest demanded that Twitch take decisive actions toward protecting streamers from hate raids, including letting creators deny incoming raids and screen out chat participants with newly made accounts. They also drew attention to Twitch policies that allow unlimited accounts to be linked to a single email address, a loophole that makes it easy to create and deploy armies of bot accounts.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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