Following a successful streamer strike earlier this month in protest of Twitch’s continued failure to adequately tackle the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of hate raiding, the company has filed a lawsuit against two individuals it has identified as persistent offenders.
Twitch’s raid feature was originally designed as a positive community tool, enabling streamers to redirect all viewers currently watching their broadcast to a target channel as an “easy way to share audiences”. However, malicious users quickly began exploiting the feature, setting up scores of dummy accounts and bots to flood other, often marginalised, streamers in order to dox, harass, and attack them while they work.
While Twitch has previously conceded it needs to “do more to address these issues”, the phenomenon has become so widespread in recent times that streamers organised a one-day strike early this month to protest a perceived lack of meaningful action by the company.
Following the strike, Twitch insisted it was “working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators”, and it now transpires the company has gone a step further, suing two individuals it says have broken its terms of service by persistently targeting marginalised streamers, “flooding their chats with bot-powered Twitch accounts that spew racist, sexist, and homophobic language and content”.