Streamers boycott Twitch for a day to demand “hate raids” reform on September 1st. “Hate raids” are when a group of people raid a streamer, usually a marginalized person, and berate them with hate speech.
Raids are meant to be a way to bring one streamer’s audience to another and share in content. For the raider, it’s a way to finish your stream and send you watchers to a friend or someone playing a similar game. For the raided, it’s a boon of new audience members and a chance to gain potential followers. By its nature, raids are a surprise. But due to this, people can bring a large audience to a stream without permission.
Big streamers trying to fight the hate raid trend have a series of demands for Twitch. These are from PC Games article on the subject.
- Hold a roundtable discussion with affected creators to assist with the creation and implementation of more proactive and comprehensive toolsets to combat abuse on their streaming platform.
- Creative proactive protection to be implemented immediately, enabling creators to select the account age of prospective chatters and allow or deny incoming raids.
- Remove the ability to attach more than three Twitch accounts to an email address—currently, hate-raiders can use one email account to register unlimited addresses.
- Provide transparency into the actions being taken to protect creators, the timeframe for implementing those tools, and the involvement of the Twitch Safety Advisory Council.
The most powerful and immediate demand is the ability to deny a raid. Some small streamers are happy with entertaining friends are sharing their games with a select few. Putting the power to turn away a random large audience ensures their community stays tailored to them. There is a potential loophole with third-party raid programs, but this is an important first step for Twitch.
Twitch has released a new article on their safety page called Combating Targeted Attacks. It gives advice to those trying to prevent hate raids. Some of the suggestions include adding moderators, turning on follower-only mode, and enabling email verification. They also mention the ability to block all raids. You can even filter this block to only friends or teammates being permitted to raid.
If targeted by an attack they suggest clearing chat, ban accounts, and report abuse. These actions are very hard to do midstream. Typically a streamer is focused on the game they are streaming. A moderator can do all these actions. If you do not have a friend who can mod for you, there is an auto-mod feature. It’s not perfect, but a great first defense. Take the time to review all of Twitch’s suggestions here: Combating Targeted Attacks.
We will discuss this on the next Geek Freaks News and come up with additional tools to prevent hate raids.
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