A Day Off Twitch and Addressing Hate Raids on the Platform
Tomorrow, 1 September, we are encouraging everyone to not use Twitch. Over the past few weeks, the ever-present problem of hate raids has gotten significantly worse. BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ creators are being attacked onstream with thousands of throwaway accounts all spamming hateful messages in their chats.
Ever-present, you ask? I can speak to that personally. In the long-long ago, when I was first streamed in 2014 and came dangerously close to being partnered, I left the platform for my own well-being. I was being bullied by a few communities who didn’t like someone like me playing horror games on Twitch. While they weren’t as overwhelming as the current hate raids, they wore me down enough to back away from a platform that literally got me hired to write for gaming sites and cover press events and conventions.
It took me six years to feel safe streaming again. Even then, I had panic attacks and ended stream dozens of times when any of that antagonism started to poke through my chat and social media . I will return to streaming soon, but I’m seriously doubting Twitch is where I want to be right now.
Twitch has promised to take action against the new hate raids, but nothing significant has come of it yet. I believe they adjusted their automod levels but these people running the hate raids have no trouble getting around that. Creators are investing their own time and money into creating systems outside of the Twitch infrastructure to protect themselves and their communities from these attacks.
There are even Twitch policies and systems in place that are making the problem worse. There are creators who want to use a VPN to protect their identity while streaming. However, if Twitch’s algorithm detects you are using a VPN, you are blocked from interacting with your chat. This means you cannot start flipping switches to go into a 24 hour follower mode or subscriber only mode to protect your chat unless you leave yourself vulnerable to far more dangerous attacks than the hate raids.
Twitch’s priorities are not in line with actually protecting all of their users. Once Amazon purchased Twitch, they wasted no time making it so no adblocker on the market could stop their ads from playing. This was after they removed “no ads” as a perk for Twitch Prime and modified it so any sponsored front page content still presents ads through the paid Twitch Turbo service.
Meanwhile, they can’t be bothered to implement proper account verification, limits on multiple accounts being created from the same email address, or any support system to block raids from bad faith actors. If you look at the responses to Twitch’s tweets on the hate raids and posts using the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter, you’ll see programmers and creators explain how easy it would be to fight off this problem with existing software and technology.
It comes down to this. If Twitch’s profits are not impacted, they’re not going to take fast action on this. This is a repeated pattern of behavior with the company since Amazon took over. Remember last summer when they swore up and down that they were going to remove known-abusers from the platform? That was a reaction to the wave of negative press they received off the hard work of Twitch creators who fought for change.
Now remember how quickly they stopped acknowledging that was a problem after the first ban of five creators? I remember. I actually don’t have the fight in me to check that database of accusations and see who is still streaming without consequence on the platform.
I digress.
Tomorrow, we hit them in the pocket. Don’t stream. Don’t watch streams. Don’t even click on the site. All their promises mean nothing if they can’t prove they’re actually prioritizing the safety of all the streamers on the site.
