The Twitch community has been suffering from hate raids for some time now. In these raids, users bring droves of bot accounts into a Twitch streamer's chat, and those bots spam hateful and abusive messages to harass the streamer. Not only is it incredibly frightening and hurtful for a streamer to experience, but it's extremely difficult for a streamer to resolve, since banning all of the incoming accounts is an ordeal. For some time now, Twitch users have been demanding that the website does something to stop these raids. Streamers and viewers recently came together for a day to boycott Twitch, sending a message about their dissatisfaction.
Thankfully, it seems like Twitch has finally taken action. The platform just rolled out some new countermeasures that could significantly reduce the number of hate raids taking place on Twitch. The new measures will simultaneously make it harder for hate bots to interact with a Twitch stream's chat while making it easier to eliminate ill-intentioned accounts. The measures are very new, so it remains to be seen if Twitch will actually become a safer place now, but Twitch's idea looks good on paper. If Twitch keeps coming up with inventive solutions like this one, then it might be able to win back a fanbase that's migrating to YouTube little by little.
Twitch's New Anti-Hate Raid Tech
Twitch's new policy has a lot to do with account verifications. Twitch now encourages users to verify their account using a phone number. From there, it's up to Twitch streamers to decide who can talk in their chat; streamers can manage chat participation permissions based on how long an account has followed their channel, how long the account has been verified with a phone number, and more. This tool aims to make it much harder for random hate bots to drop into Twitch chat and spam messages. It's a pretty elegant defense mechanism that gives Twitch streamers an empowering amount of control over their chat.
Of course, some patient Twitch trolls might still be willing to verify their accounts with phone numbers. However, Twitch has a plan for that too. Although a single phone number can now be used to verify up to five Twitch accounts, Twitch has changed its ban policy to balance that out. If a Twitch account verified with a phone number gets banned from a specific channel or all of Twitch, then any other account tied to that phone number gets banned as well. This ought to make it much harder for trolls to generate new hate accounts while making it easier for Twitch streamers to get rid of malevolent viewers.
Twitch Has to Remain Vigilant
These Twitch changes are great ideas. Twitch users now have way more tools to stop hate raids in their tracks, and Twitch is much more optimized to get rid of accounts that run hate raids. Even so, this is only the beginning. Twitch users have already expressed hopes that the platform will make changes to prevent alternate versions of hate raids. For instance, some bots spam Twitch streamers with follows, adding hundreds of fake accounts to the viewer's follow count and triggering a barrage of follow notification sounds to annoy the streamer.
Even so, it looks like many Twitch streamers agree that Twitch has made a ton of progress on the hate raid issue. Many streamers responding to Twitch about the changes seem relieved that these new moderation tools are in place, so clearly there's some faith that Twitch finally has a handle on the situation. Still, there's more issues like spam follows for Twitch to address, and Twitch can't rest on its laurels as far as hate raids are concerned. Even if these tools quell hate raids for now, trolls will look for ways around them. Twitch says it'll be monitoring the hate raid situation to see how well its tools work, so hopefully Twitch has more clever policy adjustments up its sleeve that it'll reveal soon.