Twitch is threatening to take legal action to stop anti-LGBTQ2S+ hate raids on its platform

A new wave of anti-LGBTQ2S+ “hate raids” last week has led streaming platform Twitch to consider pursuing legal actions against the perpetrators. 

In a series of tweets, the company said it had “suspended the Twitch accounts of the individuals participating” in co-ordinated attacks. Raids are used to direct a streamer’s viewers to a different channel when they stop broadcasting. Twitch describes the feature as “an easy way to share audiences” and boost smaller channels, but it can also be used by bad actors to target specific creators by flooding their chat with harassment, including slurs, hateful imagery or death threats.

“Our legal team is also involved and actively investigating,” Twitch said on March 11. “We’ve taken legal action against those who’ve harassed our community in the past and continue to take these activities seriously.”

The co-ordinated harassment was organized on cozy.tv, a far-right streaming platform co-founded by white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, according to the gaming publication Dot Esports. Fuentes, a key figure of an alt-right troll group known as Groypers, took credit for the hate raids in a video. He has previously been banned from Twitch, Reddit and YouTube.

During the attacks, marginalized streamers were also broadcast on cozy.tv and branded as “pedophiles.” 

Following the incident, Twitch provided advice for how streamers could minimize harassment, including requiring email and phone verification for chat access, forcing users to wait a certain amount of time between sending messages or only allowing set accounts to send Raids.

But the streaming platform has a long history of harassment targeting marginalized groups on its platform. Last August, a large number of LGBTQ2S+ people, women and creators of colour were previously targeted by hate raids. Some streamers were doxxed, with their legal names or addresses posted in their chats, or swatted, meaning the police were called on them for false reasons. Swatting has led to at least one death, as streamer Andrew Finch was shot by police in 2017 following a fake tip.  

Last year’s attacks led to Black queer streamer RekItRaven starting the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag, according to The Verge. Twitch issued a statement that same month promising to address “botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment,” but incidents continued. 

After RekItRaven and fellow streamers ShineyPen and LuciaEverblack organized the September #ADayOffTwitch boycott, the company responded by suing two users behind the hate raids and handing out countless suspensions. The platform saw 500,000 fewer viewers than normal that day, according to CNN Business. 

It wasn’t the first time streamers left Twitch to protest feeling unsafe. Dozens of streamers participated in a #TwitchBlackout in June 2020 to protest abuse and racism on the platform, including streamers who used their accounts to harass their romantic partners. Twitch responded at the time that it takes “accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct extremely seriously.”

The company created its Twitch Safety Advisory Council in 2020 to try to address some of the concerns voiced by critics, which led to harassment of Steph Loehr, the lone trans member on the council. Loehr faced an immediate pile-on from users who opposed the idea of the Safety Advisory Council, and last April, she told tech site Engadget that “Twitch has not done enough to protect me in the slightest.” (Loehr remains a council member.)

Twitch’s struggles to adequately respond to issues on its platform allowed conspiracy theory and far-right channels to proliferate largely unbothered until the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. capitol last year, as Kotaku reports. And the introduction of identity-based tags in May 2021, while long-requested, led to marginalized streamers seeing both increased views and increased harassment. 

While Twitch’s response to the most recent round of hate raids suggests the company is taking the threat seriously, internet trolls are notorious for finding ways to circumvent community guidelines across social media sites and streaming platforms. For now, Twitch urged users in last week’s tweets to “continue to channel ban, report and block any cases of harassment you see and know that we are working diligently to take action.”

A megathread of user-suggested solutions known as #NotFinishedYet has numerous suggestions for increasing protection for marginalised streamers, such as the ability to manually accept or deny incoming raids or blocking streams from being embedded on third-party sites.