Twitch is taking more steps to combat hate on its platform. For the past several months, minority and marginalized streamers have been subjected to hate raids where bots flood stream chats to spam hateful messages. These raids have resulted in streamers taking #ADayOffTwitch to protest Twitch's lack of action to combat these bad actors.
Recently, we found out that Twitch was actually taking legal action against a few users while the streaming platform worked on improving its technology. Today, Twitch is unveiling new moderator tools that will hopefully put a stop to hate raids once and for all.
"Today, we’re updating our suite of moderation tools by adding phone-verified chat and expanding the settings for email verification, to help Creators better control their chat experience and improve security," Twitch wrote in a blog post. After enabling phone and/or email verification, users will be required to verify their accounts before being able to chat.
To enable, streamers and chat moderators will need to do into the dashboard and select "manage moderator settings." Here, moderators can require phone verification, email verification, or both for all accounts, first-time chatters, new accounts, or users who have only been following for a short amount of time. Moderators will be able to further select how long users have been following or how old an account is before it's allowed to chat.
Users can verify up to five accounts through their phone number or email, but to address ban evasion issues, once a single phone/email has been banned from a stream, all accounts associated with that phone/email are also banned.
“Our work to make Twitch safer will never be over, just as there’ll never be a single fix for harassment and hate online,” Twitch added. “But as long as toxic behavior can find ways into our communities, we must – and will – keep working on ways to make it harder to do so."
The only issue with this new system is that it must be enabled by the streamer or their moderator team. If a streamer isn’t aware of these tools, they’ll still be vulnerable to hate raids. Thus, Twitch will need to get the message out to streamers for these tools to be effective.