Twitch is the place many people go to in order to watch their favorite streamers, gamers, and personalities. For the most part, Twitch is primarily a place for streaming. However, as of late, the titan of gaming and streaming has been dealing with problems with "hate raiding," where users will join a stream in order to harass a certain streamer. Now, one of the biggest names on the platform has had to cut her broadcast short due to the wave of hate sent her way.

Pokimane, or Imane Anys, is a popular streamer who has found major success both on YouTube and Twitch. As one of the bigger names in streaming, Pokimane has been the target for hate before, and she has often had to ban many users from her chat. Last year she revealed the insane number of users that are banned from her Twitch streams due to inappropriate messages from followers, trolls and chat spammers. On January 12, Pokimane had to cut her stream short due to a raid by popular YouTuber and streamer Jidion.

RELATED: Twitch Bans Pokimane After Streaming Avatar

Jidion, who often makes videos and streams based around messing with strangers, sent a wave of hate viewers Pokimane's way while she was streaming Valorant. In a party with other popular Twitch streamers, such as Valkyrae, QuarterJade and a few others, Pokimane began to notice a huge amount of viewers spamming “L + RATIO” in her chat. The raiders were also signalling that it was Jidion who sent them to the stream. Pokimane at first wondered if the spam was coming from bots or genuine users, and shut down her stream after Jidion fans were whispering and harassing Pokimane's viewers.

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The streamer had only been broadcasting for an hour when she cut her stream short, and it is not just Pokimane who is suffering from hate raids either. Twitch reported that it had banned 15 million hate bots, which would spam hate speech and harassment, in 2021. The streaming titan received criticism from both streamers and viewers in its approach to tackling the excessive amount of hate raids, which can be especially harmful to smaller streamers.

However, Twitch has been recently making a stronger effort to deal with hate raids. Apart from banning the bots that spam hate and harassment, the platform also banned Jidion after he began the hate raid against Pokimane, and is working on anti-hate raid chat changes, alongside further countermeasures in the future. Although, hate raids certainly still exist, and making them disappear entirely will come down to more than just chat changes.

MORE: Twitch's Hate Raid Controversy Explained

Source: Twitch