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Twitch Does the Bare Minimum to Stop Hate on Platform: Sues Two Harassers

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The Twitch logo, the word "Twitch" stylized in lowercaseAmazon-owned streaming company Twitch has a serious hate problem. The platform has been taken over by “hate raids” targeting minorities. Twitch themselves made this easy with self-identifying tags that help streamers attract an audience from their community, but also help hateful users target marginalized groups. Twitch then deals harsher punishments to members of those communities.

The problem as gotten so bad that users have staged protests, including one where about a million streamers logged off, costing Twitch roughly 22% of their traffic for a single day. Hundreds of thousands of people protested on Twitter and other platforms with the hashtag, #ADayOffTwitch.

Twitch makes it easy for a single email address to create multiple accounts without verification. This allows spammers to quickly spin up accounts to evade bans or create bots that can spam hateful messages. They’ve even doxxed some popular streamers, in an effort to drive crazies to their doorstep or engage in “Swatting,” that is, claiming there is a violent emergency at a location so police respond with force and without thought, killing the victim.

Twitch could do some very easy things to help streamers. They could make it more difficult to create fake accounts, apply spam and hate speech filters across the platform, simply enable two-factor authentication, and give creators more automated control over their platforms. Instead, Twitch has done next to nothing to stop the waves of hate on their platform. Until now. Now, Twitch is suing two people behind large hate raids. It could be a huge step towards stopping the practice through the fear of punishment, rather than simply creating the basic tools to fix the problem.

It’s the least Twitch could do, but will it work?

Twitch’s Lawsuits

Twitch’s lawsuits target two people, known only through their anonymous user names and the nations they’re based in. One is likely in the Netherlands, the other is in Austria. Both conducted hate raids, sending their hateful followers and fake accounts flooding into a marginalized person’s channel.

Twitch’s own tools make it easy for these people to continue doing hate raids, even after Twitch has banned them repeatedly. Often they meet off-platform, on Discord servers, then carry out coordinated attacks together. Because of this, it’s not even certain if the two usernames Twitch is going after are even the only usernames these people use. Anonymizing traffic is easy, and Twitch does nothing to try to permanetly ban these users themselves, not just the accounts they make.

Even when it comes to suing people who have broken Twitch’s rules, Twitch’s own system gets in their way.

Hate Raids Still a Problem

These two people aren’t the only people conducting hate raids. There are many on the platform. Twitch has tools like the raid feature specifically made for sending your followers to another streamer, a feature that has extensively been used for harassment, with little clear benefit otherwise. Twitch hasn’t turned this feature off, though it would significantly reduce hate raids.

Twitch has many options ahead of them. This lawsuit, for which they still don’t even have the actual names of the perpetrators, isn’t going to do much. Even if they eventually are caught, hateful users on Twitch have seen that, out of the uncountable number of people doing this, Twitch only went after two, and may not even successfully track them down.

Twitch has easy solutions ahead of them that even small startups have been able to implement. They simply choose not to because they don’t care enough about racist, homophobic, and transphobic hate spreading on their platform. These lawsuits are the bare minimum. In fact, they’re so small, it’s likely they’re completely ineffective. But Twitch is likely looking to fix their image, rather than actually fix the problem. Looks like this will do neither.

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