Twitch Is Under Fire for Hate Raids — Can It Combat Them?
Twitch streamers — and online creators in general — are no strangers to trolls and hate, courtesy of keyboard warriors that are only brave when hiding behind a computer screen. Some of their tactics have recently become more dangerous, such as swatting, where people find out where the streamer lives and call the police on them. For the most part, though, they’ve been unpleasant but mostly harmless.
The latest trend in Twitch trolls is hate raids. They are using bots to take a fun Twitch feature — raids, which allow creators to move their audience to someone else’s stream when theirs is done — and spamming their chat with threats and other hate speech. These raids can trigger Twitch’s automated moderator policies and even result in bans.
Who is finding themselves the target of these trolls, and what can Twitch do to combat this bad behavior?
A Target on Their Back
Online creators can’t please everyone. It’s just a fact of life. The problem is that they aren’t being targeted for the games they play or even the opinions they share on their channels. They’re often being targeted simply for existing. LGBTQIA+ streamers, people of color, plus-sized creators and the disabled all found themselves with targets on their backs.
Most top Twitch streamers are cis-gendered, heterosexual white men — and these aren’t the people being targeted. It’s everyone else. These bad actors use a feature integrated into Twitch to target creators by their hashtags to find other members of their respective communities.
Cyberstalking and harassment are both crimes — but with hate raiders hiding behind dummy accounts and VPNs, tracking them is beyond even what Twitch is capable of.
Twitch Needs to Do Better
Twitch claims new features are in the works to help creators combat these hate raids. In the meantime, short of shutting off all attacks or employing mods, there isn’t a lot people can do to prevent these raids. The hashtag #twitchdobetter has been making the rounds on social media, but Twitch is still hiding behind its statement — “we’re working on it.”
Streamers are creating their own tools for dealing with these bad actors. These digital panic buttons shut off alert boxes, switch to sub-only chat mode, clear the chat, play an ad and more, depending on the code. The goal is to keep audience members from seeing a hate raid while the creator and mods get things back under control.
There is even some talk that Twitch is looking into machine learning to detect people using fake or dummy accounts to evade bans, which could also help manage these hate raids. In the meantime, there aren’t many options for creators who find themselves a target.
Twitch Needs to Switch It Up
Twitch knows what it needs to do to combat these hate raids, but it isn’t doing enough. Cynics might argue that it isn’t a priority because big moneymakers aren’t targeted. However, if enough streamers abandon ship because their concerns aren’t being addressed, Twitch might start figuring out it needs to take care of its creators, or it won’t have enough left to keep the lights on.