Screenshot/Rekitraven/Twitch
- Since May, Black streamers have been attacked by "hate raids" on Twitch.
- Streamers say Twitch has done little to combat the hate raids.
- In response, the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter spread on Twitter and a boycott is planned for September 1.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
On Thursday night, Twitch streamer Raven, a Black woman, said she spent two and a half hours being bombarded with over 300 messages that included racist slurs and hateful rhetoric. Some of the messages even included her real name, even though she has never revealed her personal information on the platform.
This isn't an isolated incident on Twitch, which is used by gamers and other content creators to broadcast live to their communities and fanbases. Over the past month, Raven has dealt with multiple accounts spamming her streams with graphic, violent comments referencing the Ku Klux Klan and using racial slurs like the N-word.
"It's important to know that the amount of harassment on the platform has genuinely caused a lot of people a lot of trauma," Raven, who does not share her last name publicly because of privacy concerns, told Insider. "It's hard enough for us marginalized people to exist in a world where systemically things are made harder for us and we are constantly reminded of that."
81.5% percent of Twitch viewers and streamers are male, and 71.5% identify as white, according to 2018 data gathered by StreamElements. Black creators made up just 3.9% of streamers and viewers.
Over the past few months, Black creators and other marginalized communities on Twitch have faced multiple coordinated harassment attacks known as "hate raids." Some say their complaints aren't being taken seriously by the Amazon-owned company.
After being raided repeatedly, Raven started the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter on Twitter, planned a September 1 boycott, and created a Change.org petition with the goal of amplifying the voices of those targeted by hate raids.The petition has reached over 14,000 signatures.
The #ADayOffTwitch boycott is being touted mainly by smaller streamers, with larger content creators silent or dismissive of the movement. Zack, who runs the 2.3 million subscriber Twitch channel Asmongold and whose last name isn't public, said during a stream that "nobody gives a f---- if you take the day off, nobody knows who you are."
Hate raids have exploded on Twitch over the last month
A "raid" is a function on Twitch that allows streamers to send their viewership to another channel when they go offline. Normally, it's used to boost the viewership of a smaller channel or to introduce a creator's audience to someone new.
In a hate raid, a user abuses this functionality by using bots - fake users that can be programmed to watch a channel or type in a chat - to spam a streamer's chat section.
It's unclear who is behind these attacks, but it's fairly simple to acquire bot accounts. To create an account on Twitch, you only need a working email address, making it easy to create multiple new accounts. Bot accounts can also be created or purchased online, with some sites offering 100 bot accounts for $5.
When the attacks start, moderators can manually delete and ban each user in the chat room. Preemptively, streamers can also protect themselves by turning off the ability to be raided or keeping their chat in subscriber or follower mode, but this can limit their own growth.
These fake accounts can also follow a streamer en-masse, which puts a streamer's account in jeopardy. Twitch warns on their site that "fake engagement and artificial inflation of channel statistics are violations of our policies" and can lead to an "indefinite suspension."
Twitch doesn't offer any tools to deal with unwanted fake followers.
People from marginalized communities are being targeted by harassment
While hate raids are an issue across Twitch, people of color, women, and others from marginalized communities appear to be facing the worst harassment, following well-documented online trends. According to a 2020 Pew Research study, 54% of Black individuals who were harassed online say it was because of their race or ethnicity.
"There is no doubt in my mind that I was raided because I am a Black woman that exists on Twitch," streamer DefinedByKy, who asked to have her name withheld for privacy reasons, told Insider.
-Ky | She/Her (@DefinedByKy) August 15, 2021
DefinedByKy, who has 7,000 followers on Twitch, told Insider that she was hate raided for the first time on August 14 while playing "Among Us" with friends. A message with the N-word kept "getting spammed over and over," she said, forcing her to turn on a chat function that only allowed her paying subscribers to chat. Since then, she told Insider, she has been hate raided four more times.
"We go through so much and we act strong but at the end of the day, there's still people out there who hate us for just existing," DefinedByKy said on her Twitch stream after the first raid.
Paige Harvey, who said she is disabled and streams on Twitch to 2,000 followers as Arthremis, told Insider that she's had to deal with over five hate events. She estimated that she's dealt with thousands of bots over the past three years on the platform.
Twitch remade its tagging system to try to be more inclusive, but it may have backfired
On Twitch, streamers can apply tags to their streams, allowing viewers to filter specific content. When the tags were introduced in 2018, they were limited to video game title and content-type.
In May 2021, the tag system was reworked with over 350 new options, which included tags meant to foster community around sexual orientation, race, and cultural identifiers. Streamers used these new tagging options to be more open about themselves while trying to cultivate larger communities based on these identifiers.
The new tags, however, have given trolls an easy way to target marginalized creators. Three streamers interviewed for this story used the "Black" tag, which they say made them a target for hate raids.
"The majority of the targets have been Black individuals," Omega Jones, who runs the 16,000-follower Critical Bard Twitch account, told Insider. Jones said he's been using the tags that have been targeted by trolls.
Using tags for targeted harassment is against the site's Community Guidelines, according to a Twitch blog post.
Streamers are speaking out about the raids
On Friday, in response to criticism about hate raids, Twitch tweeted that they have been building "ban evasion detection" to try to address the issue and that streamers should "keep reporting these egregious attacks."
"This is an ongoing battle, hate on the internet won't win," co-host RayApollo said on a Friday Public Access stream hosted by Twitch that's dedicated to sharing site-wide updates. "We have been focused on making those hate raids a lot harder for them to pull off."
-OMEGAN THE STALLION. (@CriticalBard) August 10, 2021
Without a clear plan of attack, streamers are left struggling with these hate raids without an answer or direction from Twitch.
Noah Downs, an entertainment lawyer who is now representing Raven, told Insider that the platform "has the ability to make tools to shut this down," but it's not clear "whether they are willing to devote the time and resources needed to get it done."
Twitch declined to comment.
Read more stories from Insider's Digital Culture desk.