Twitch under fire as streamers demand firmer response to ‘hate raid’ harassment

Over a week after #TwitchDoBetter started trending, Twitch is under more scrutiny as streamers demand firmer action against hate raid harassment.

Twitch’s TOS condemn any “hateful conduct” on their platform, which specifies anything that includes discrimination based on ‘race, ethnicity, and color.’

Unfortunately, bigots and follow bots do still operate on there, and an unknown user has been creating hundreds of accounts to harass marginalized streamers with racist chat spam.

More than a week after the creation of #TwitchDoBetter on Twitter, by activist and streamer RekItRaven, Twitch has only publicly responded once with a series of tweets announcing plans for later in the year.

Following the reveal of plans for channel-level ban evasion detection and account verification improvements, that was the last we heard from company chiefs regarding issues of increased harassment on the platform.

Those affected have continued on with supporting each other as well as creating another Twitter hashtag, #SubOffTwitch, hoping that if supporters take their money off of the Amazon-owned platform, it might lead to another response.

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Along with #TwitchDoBetter and #SubOffTwitch being used to bring attention to the issue, streamers have also created a petition and a hate raid response group under the Twitter handle @EndHateRaids

Twitch under scrutiny

Since Twitch’s reply regarding ban detection and account verification improvements, those affected haven’t heard anything else.

On August 18, Twitch Support released a tweet announcing new VOD and clip settings – which was met with replies asking about the response to hate raids and what they were going to do to stop the attacks on streamers of all kinds.

https://twitter.com/SirKatelyn/status/1428100605633974273?s=20

Unfortunately for those affected, Twitch continued the day ignoring any questions regarding the attacks, while responding to replies regarding the VOD and clip topic at hand.

The lack of action has also left social media users in an uproar, including the #TwitchDoBetter creator citing “enough is enough”.

iamBrandon aldo added: “This is exactly why black folks were calling for accountability of people who screamed ‘support black creators’ last year and obviously not saying anything now.”

What are ‘hate raids?’

Unfortunately, hate raids are nothing new to the live streaming platform. They consist of mass-created bot accounts spamming racial and homophobic slurs directed at some creators while live streaming.

These often derail the stream and ruin a creator’s mood, often leading to them ending the stream due to verbal attacks.

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While there are precautions streamers can have in place for the platform’s built-in raid system like turning raids off and turning on follower-only chat, these pointed attacks often bypass these precautions, as seen here.