Twitch has vowed to do more to combat hate on its platform.
The livestreaming giant announced on Wednesday (11.08.21) it will be rolling out new protections for its most vulnerable users, after users recently took to Twitter to shed light on “hate raids”, which occur when bad-faith users employ bots to shower a streamer with abuse.
Twitch said: “We’ve seen a lot of conversation about botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalized creators. You’re asking us to do better, and we know we need to do more to address these issues. That includes an open and ongoing dialogue about creator safety.”
As part of the company’s new protections, Twitch have upped the ante on their proactive filters, which will be able to detect and block more “hate speech” in chats than ever before.
They added: “[We identified] a vulnerability in our proactive filters, and have rolled out an update to close this gap and better detect hate speech in chat.”
Twitch also said more safety features are coming in the weeks ahead, including a tighter account verification process and channel-level ban evasion detection tools.
The push to get Twitch to do more to combat hate came after Twitch streamer RekItRaven - who is Black and uses they/them pronouns – helped trend the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter on Twitter after their account was overrun by racist messages earlier this month.
Since then, users have spoken out in force to condemn the identity-based harassment as they urged Twitch to step in and address it.
A Twitch user named Vanessa told The Washington Post: “Every marginalised identity creator I know has at least one story, baseline, even if they don’t stream regularly. The thing that’s most terrifying is that the hate is aimed at all of us equally. Size, frequency, status - none of it matters. They look out for the marginalized identity and go to work.”
