Twitch streaming has become increasingly popular in recent years, with many able to make a living on the platform. While many users stream themselves playing video games, there are tons of other types of content creators on the site. In the past, Twitch has also been vocal in its support of marginalized voices, especially during times like Black History Month or Pride Month. Recently though, many of these creators have been targeted with hate raids at a pace previously unseen, occurring almost daily and, in some cases, for hours at a time.
“Hate raids” are not new to Twitch, but they’re hitting the platform at record speed of late. Usually, raids are meant to be fun ways to get different communities to interact, so when one creator ends their stream they’ll take their community to another streamer’s space. The communities get to intermingle, and sometimes this can lead to friendships between creators. Hate raids, however, have a creator take their viewers to a different streamer’s channel and drop hateful, often racist and/or homophobic messages into their chat. Hate raids have become increasingly common and Twitch needs to acknowledge the issue head-on.
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How Hate Raids Affect Twitch Streamers
Hate raids have been an all-too-common occurrence on Twitch. Hateful people tend to find ways to spread their messages even if precautions are in place to prevent hate raids. These hate raids typically spam creators’ chats with vile messages, most of the time asserting that certain people like marginalized racial and sexual identities should not exist. The messages sent are much more vulgar and often contain slurs, but usually specifically crafted slurs that are spelled out using symbols so chat filters can’t catch the word, meaning it shows up in chat instead of being censored or blocked.
Hate raids are often accompanied by “follow-bot” attacks when tons of fake accounts follow the streamer’s channel. Follow-bots spam the chat with tons of new followers, which might sound like a good thing, but because they’re fake profiles they only hurt a streamer’s numbers. They also ultimately try to break and overwhelm a stream, especially for creators with special notifications and pop-ups for new followers. These follow-bots have to be removed manually, taking extra time away from streamers to take the accounts out of their follower list. These typically aren’t small follow-bot numbers, either - there can be hundreds in a single follow-bot attack.
Even though hate raids have become the norm for some marginalized creators, the mental toll these events take cannot be overstated. Marginalized streamers often curate their communities carefully so they don’t have to deal with that kind of negativity, especially from people who think they shouldn’t exist based on traits like sexuality or race. It’s a gut punch to see security measures bypassed, and to be reminded that there are people out there who don’t want them and their community to be there. It’s mentally exhausting to be the target of these attacks or to see close streamer friends go through the same thing.
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How Twitch Can Do Better With Hate Raids
Many streamers are appalled and upset that the only thing Twitch has done regarding hate raids is acknowledge creators have been heard by the company. Again, hate raids are not new, they’re just more prevalent now. Precautions and safety measures should have been put in place long before hate raids became this abundant. It has been up to creators to find the tools to stop hate raids and filter out any and all language that could be input to spell slurs. The burden should not be on creators, but rather on Twitch to protect all of its users - especially the ones it likes to highlight during Black History Month and Pride Month.
Safety tools should be integrated into the foundation of Twitch. Creators should not have to seek outside sources just to feel safe in their own community and space. There needs to be a better filter when it comes to offensive language, specifically slurs that can be used to target marginalized identities. Twitch needs to be made a safe place for all of its users, and that starts with giving creators access to proper tools and having safeguards in place that cannot be bypassed. There’s only so much that a followers-only chat mode and banned words list (that streamers must create on their own channel and is not Twitch-wide) can do, and Twitch needs to bridge that gap quickly.
Twitch is a source of income for a ton of the platform’s creators, so it’s detrimental to their livelihoods that they can’t do their job without being attacked. Not long ago, #TwitchDoBetter started trending on Twitter to call attention to the seeming inaction by Twitch, and even that hashtag has put targets on peoples’ backs because hate raiders will specifically go after those who have spoken out. Without action, there is no change, and Twitch streamers have already spoken about what Twitch needs to do to protect its creators from these hateful attacks. Now it’s up to Twitch to do the work and show marginalized creators it will protect them from hate raids.