Twitch Sues 'Hate Raiders' Linked To Automated Harassment Campaigns
In these attacks, malicious individuals use large groups of bots to send spam, hate speech, and chat content that they themselves embed, targeting creators from marginalized communities.
Earlier this week, Twitch filed a lawsuit against people involved in harassment activities. This week, the company filed suit against another person involved in the harassment campaign.
The lawsuit comes after a number of Twitch streamers left the platform on 1 September to protest the company's ineffective handling of the situation. The files come after a host of Twitch streamers resigned from the platform September 1 in protest at the company's ineffective handling of this situation.
As Wired first reported, the lawsuit filed yesterday in U.S. federal court names two defendants, CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, and accuses them of being responsible for some of the hate-filled raids that have plagued Twitch since early August. The complaint against Twitch accuses Cruzzcontrol of being responsible for a network of more than 3,000 bots engaged in hate raids against streamers from the Black and LGBTQIA+ community. In addition to overwhelming channels of racist, homophobic and sexist spam, Twitch says the bots are working with each other to spread for similar purposes.
By signaling to its users that it takes harassment seriously, Twitch is committed to protecting its users from the worst. In February 2018, Twitch updated its acceptable content guidelines to determine that content it considers hateful be removed from its platform. In August, following the release of a hashtag campaign that called on the platform to crack down on hate-filled content, Twitch announced that it would introduce some new features to address the ongoing problem of malicious trolling.
Will this be enough? Will Twitch follow through? Let us know your thoughts on the comments.