Twitch takes a strong stand against organized harassment campaigns, widely known as “hate raids,” which have proliferated in recent months by filing a lawsuit against two possible coordinators of the attacks.
In a complaint filed Sept. 9, smoking giant Twitch filed lawsuits against two anonymous individuals who believed they were leaders in the ongoing “hate raids.” Thanks to the platform’s “raid” feature, which allows streamers to redirect their viewers to another stream, bad faith actors can channel the masses from one harassment campaign to another channel. These users usually do not arrive with good intentions; they often throw insults, insults and obscenities en masse at the streamer in the channel to which they are sent. While hate raids have been a problem on Twitch for a while, the problem has spread this summer.
In early August, the marginalized serpentines gathered behind the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter on social media. On September 1, in an effort to get Twitch to act, the streamers boycotted the platform for a day. It seems to have had an impact, both about the conversation and on the bottom line. Twitch traffic for #ADayOffTwitch was about one-fifth less than a typical day.
Twitch has taken some steps to mitigate hate incursions in light of the new attention, including the institution of sensors designed to automatically detect users avoiding circumventions. The company has also begun banning offenders individually (which, as you can imagine, is a task that will never end). Now, the company is testing one of the biggest ban hammers on the planet: the U.S. judicial system.
Yesterday’s dress, which Twitch provided her Kotaku, names two anonymous individuals who operate under the usernames CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose. The lawsuit alleges that CruzzControl and CreatineOdose helped promote, organize, and participate in large-scale hate incursions. An wide Washington Post report detailed how and where hate raids are organized, not on Twitch itself, but on Discord’s clandestine servers, where users can operate outside of Twitch’s scrutiny.
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Twitch believes CruzzControl is headquartered in the Netherlands, while CreatineOdose is intended to live in Austria. Twitch does not yet know the legal name of either user. Both users allegedly operate under various usernames, the latter has shown an amazing creative genius with handles like CreatineReturns, CreatineBanEvades and CreatineReported. Because it’s incredibly easy to create a new account on Twitch, banned users can quickly return to their vile behavior. Streamers he said Kotaku last month that raising the bar to create a new account, for example, requiring users to sign up with a registered phone number, would be one of the most effective ways to permanently undo hate incursions.
“While we have identified and banned thousands of accounts over the past few weeks, these actors continue to work hard in creative ways to circumvent our improvements and show no intention of stopping,” a Twitch spokesman said. Kotaku in a statement. “Hate and harassment don’t take place on Twitch and we know we have a lot more work to do, but we hope these combined actions will help reduce the immediate and unacceptable damage that targeted attacks have been inflicting on our community.”