Twitch has officially taken legal action against hate raiding on its platform. It is currently suing two of its users for regularly raiding marginalized Twitch streamers' livestreams with hateful and harrassing content.
Raiding is a built-in option on Twitch that allows users to move all of their viewers to another live streamer in order to help them gain new followers and promote their channel to new users. However, some users have been weaponizing this feature, using it to "hate raid" marginalized Twitch users. The raiders fill the streamer's chat with hateful homophobic, racist, or other inflammatory messages in order to harrass the streamer. This hate raiding is a violation of Twitch's terms of service.
As of yesterday, September 9, Twitch is suing two of its users for hate raiding: user Cruzzcontrol of the Netherlands and CreatineOverdose in Austria. After a round of Twitch sending emails to users warning them against hate raiding, it has taken legal action against these two for violation of contract, citing the terms of service that forbid harassment. The two users were said to "attack these streamers by flooding their chats with bot-powered Twitch accounts that spew racist, sexist, and homophobic language and content" according to the case documents.
These users are described in the documents as using new accounts to dodge bans, and are "continually altering their self-described 'hate raid code' to avoid detection and suspension by Twitch." The complaint continues on to say that Twitch has "expended significant resources" to attempt to curb the two users' hate raiding code, bots, and alternate account creation. Twitch has yet to uncover the legal names of either user.
Twitch has also banned thousands of accounts over the last month and has worked to create new tools to help victims of hate raids filter out the messages brought by bots and hateful users. “We 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,” a Twitch spokesperson said. But banning doesn't stop the hate raiders from creating new accounts or creating bots to continue to attack marginalized streamers.
Recent hashtags like #TwitchDoBetter and #ADayOffTwitch have been trending on social media platforms as marginalized streamers and their fans' attempt to get Twitch to take their concerns over harassment seriously seems to have worked. Although hate raids are relatively new, harassment of streamers certainly isn't. Previously trending hashtags like #twitchblackout are proof that such issues have been part and parcel with the platform since it began 10 years ago. Hopefully this legal action is the beginning of the end of the massive surge in online harassment.
Source: Wired