On September 1, earlier this year, many streamers participated in the event, #ADayOffTwitch, to send a message to Twitch that their lackadaisical approach to the hate raids happening on Twitch was not going to be tolerated. The event included many streamers boycotting the platform for the entire day after some stramers had been relentlessly targeted by bots that spam abusive language, racial slurs, personal information, and even Nazi imagery. Unfortunately, the hate raids seemed to have continued after the boycott.
Before this day-long boycott took place, Twitch had responded to the streamers’ complaints with the following message:
We've been building channel-level ban evasion detection and account improvements to combat this malicious behavior for months. However, as we work on solutions, bad actors work in parallel to find ways around them—which is why we can't always share details.
They also were encouraging people to report anyone exhibiting these behaviors.
Sadly yet unsurprisingly, Twitch saw very little success against the hate raids with these actions. Now, it seems that Twitch has finally decided to do something more drastic. According to Wired, Twitch is suing two anonymous users for “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content,” because that content violates their terms of service.
In a direct comment to Wired, a spokesperson for Twitch stated the following:
We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community.
Though Twitch banned thousands of accounts prior to the lawsuit, it seems that wasn’t enough to discourage people from jumping on the platform to harass others anyway. But perhaps Twitch taking legal action will finally be enough to scare others from participating in hate raids. Whatever the case, it seems that #ADayOffTwitch might have had an impact after all, as the Twitch is clearly now taking the situation seriously.