Twitch Sues Users Over Hate Raids Targeting Streamers

Twitch Takes Legal Action Against Harassment Campaign Organizers

Late last week, Twitch initiated legal proceedings against two individuals utilizing its platform to orchestrate automated campaigns of hate and harassment. This action signifies a firm stance against abusive behavior within the streaming community.

Understanding “Hate Raids” on Twitch

The harassment, frequently directed towards Black and LGBTQ streamers, takes the form of a specific Twitch phenomenon known as a “hate raid.” These raids are a perversion of the standard “raid” practice.

Typically, streamers conclude their broadcasts by directing viewers to another creator’s channel, a gesture intended to increase audience size. Hate raids, however, utilize this mechanism to unleash a barrage of bots designed to harass streamers lacking sufficient moderation tools.

Misuse of Twitch’s Tagging System

These malicious activities may be exploiting Twitch’s recently implemented tagging system. This system, initially introduced at the request of many transgender users, aimed to facilitate community building and content discovery.

In May, Twitch expanded its tagging options to include over 350 new tags, categorizing streams by attributes such as “gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more.” Unfortunately, accounts engaged in abusive behavior are now leveraging these tags to target streamers with racist, sexist, transphobic, and homophobic harassment.

While Twitch states it hasn’t established “clear evidence” linking the attacks directly to the tags, the platform acknowledges that its discoverability features can be exploited for “malicious purposes.”

Details of the Lawsuit

The lawsuit identifies the alleged hate raiders as “highly motivated” individuals consistently devising new methods to bypass Twitch’s terms of service.

Two users, “CruzzControl” and “CreatineOverdose,” are specifically named in the suit, though Twitch has been unable to ascertain their legal identities. These individuals are located in the Netherlands and Austria, respectively, and their disruptive activity commenced in August of this year.

Twitch alleges that CruzzControl alone is connected to approximately 3,000 bot accounts involved in orchestrating hate raids.

Potential Impact and Deterrent Effect

Even if identifying the individuals behind these campaigns proves challenging, the lawsuit is intended to discourage similar abusive behavior on the platform. It aims to serve as a warning to others contemplating directing waves of abuse towards streamers.

“While we have identified and banned thousands of accounts over the past weeks, these actors continue to work hard on creative ways to circumvent our improvements, and show no intention of stopping,” the lawsuit states. “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.”

Ongoing Efforts to Enhance Safety

A Twitch spokesperson informed TechCrunch that the legal action is just one component of a broader effort to address targeted attacks.

Proactive measures are being taken to update detection systems, respond to emerging abusive behaviors, and finalize new channel-level safety tools that have been under development for several months.

Streamer Protest and Demands

Prior to Twitch’s legal action, a streamer-led protest, #ADayOffTwitch, was organized to express dissatisfaction with the company’s response to hate raids.

Participants demanded decisive action to protect streamers, including the ability to deny incoming raids and filter chat participants based on account age. Concerns were also raised regarding Twitch’s policies allowing an unlimited number of accounts to be linked to a single email address, a vulnerability exploited to create bot armies.

Update: Twitch clarified that while there isn't a publicly stated limit, the number of accounts associated with a single email address is not unlimited.

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