Twitch files lawsuit against alleged 'hate raiders'
The streaming platform takes action following a streamer strike last week.
Twitch took a step toward reducing the hate on its platform.
Amazon's Twitch was criticized last week for its lack of action against a form of harassment on the streaming platform where certain users unleash a bot army to abuse a streamer, also known as "hate raids." The company took a big step Thursday by filing a lawsuit against two individuals who allegedly conducted the raids.
"The malicious actors involved have been highly motivated in breaking our terms of service, creating new waves of fake bot accounts designed to harass creators even as we continually update our sitewide protections against their rapidly evolving behaviors," a Twitch spokesperson said in an emailed statement Friday. "While we have identified and banned thousands of accounts over the past weeks, these actors continue to work hard on creative ways to circumvent our improvements, and show no intention of stopping."
Last week, Twitch streamers protested Twitch's lack of action against hate raids by refusing to stream, calling it #ADayOffTwitch. These raids typically focus on women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color, and consist of flooding a channel's chat with abusive language and slurs.
Twitch says this lawsuit won't be the last action it'll take to address targeted attacks. It already banned thousands of accounts in recent weeks and implemented tools for streamers to filter out harassment in a channel's chat.