Streamer strife as hate-raids hit Twitch

While Twitch streamers go dark in protest of hate-raids on the platform, it’s a symptom of a larger issue within internet culture

Recently streamers have been bombarded with homophobic, racist and sexist bots, which are spamming messages in their chat for an extended period of time.

In May, Twitch introduced a feature with tags related to sexual orientation, gender, and race among others. This feature was requested by the community, but inadvertently allowed malicious hate-raids to target content creators using the tags.

Streamer BrySuperSaurus told Ticker News that while Twitch is aware of the issue, content creators on the platform want to see more done to combat hate raids and online trolling.

“Hate and hurtful, harmful comments, trolls for people on Twitch isn’t a new thing, this has been happening for a long time,” he said.

“But these hate raids and the fact bots are now doing it to people who use these tags has ramped up to an exponential amount.”

Content creators on the platform are frustrated about a perceived lack of action by Twitch, and organised a ‘day off Twitch’ on September 1st in an effort to force the company to take action.

In a statement on Twitter, Twitch said that they would do more to address the online harassment of targeting marginalised creators.

Mass bot attacks are a relatively new form of online ‘trolling’, however they are reminiscent of previous attempts carried out by online communities to harass other communities.

The 4Chan community was infamous for these raids, which often took the form of racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic behaviour.

Bot-raids are just the next evolution of these activities, where one person can create an army of bots to do the work that previously would have taken an entire community.

Reddit, one of the internet’s most popular websites, has been fighting its own battle against hate and disinformation. The website introduced quarantining subreddits in an effort to keep them separate from other communities on the website, and has banned subreddits they view as hateful or who have committed ‘brigading’, where members of the community will mass comment to troll other communities on the site.

The issues with hate-raids aren’t solely contained to Twitch, however they risk content creators leaving the platform if they don’t address it quickly.