Hate incursions on Twitch have grown to impressive levels in recent months, which is why several users have decided to raise their voices to respond to these situations in the face of the ‘lack of response’ from the streamer platform.
However, it seems that Twitch has decided to put a stop, at least two users, who were in charge of bombing people of color and LGBTQ people with racist, sexist and homophobic content while broadcasting, using alternative accounts to avoid being banned.
The streamers application filed a lawsuit in which it alleged that since August users CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose used bots to conduct “hate forays” against broadcasters who identify as racial minorities and / or members of the LBGTQ community, spamming their chats with a torrent of racial slurs, links to gory videos, as well as stealing ipersonal identification information.
According to the information, at least 3,000 were the alleged bots used by CruzzControl for your hate raids, “Including those targeting black and LGBTQIA + broadcasters with racist, homophobic, sexist and harassing content,” according to the lawsuit.
For his part, User CreatineOverdose also allegedly “used its bot software to demonstrate how it could be used to spam Twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic depictions of violence against minorities, and claims that the hate attackers are the KKK.”
Before a lawsuit, the The platform first suspended and then permanently banned the known Twitch accounts of these users, but they would have created new accounts and were working on modifying their self-described “hate raid code” to avoid being found and banned again, according to the lawsuit.
Allegedly, the harassment reached such a degree that some streamers were forced to stop streaming on the platform, Twitch said, “eliminating a major source of revenue.”
Although the real names behind these accounts were not mentioned, Twitch said it will amend their complaint if it succeeds in determining their legal names. So far all you know is that CruzzControl is a person located in Baarto, the Netherlands, and CreatineOverdose is a resident of Vienna, Austria.
Hate has affected the platform
For months, the cThe company has “expended significant resources” to combat hate raids, including research from CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, as well as to make tech fixes and educate streamers who have been attacked by hate on how to moderate their conversations.
However, these two users came to violate his terms of service so repeatedly that he assured that “he has been and will continue to be harmed, which entitles him to precautionary measures, compensatory damages, attorneys’ fees, costs and / or other equitable compensation” .
Many users still question the platform’s commitment to preventing harassment and protecting users beyond its last legal effort, since since June 2020, dozens of people presented allegations of sexual harassment and assault against popular streamers in the Twitch community, with many saying the company continued promoting and supporting the accused.
On more than one occasion, users have organized boycotts against the platform, the most recent under the hashtag #ADayOffTwitch , where at least 20 thousand transmitters disappeared from the platform that day and 400 thousand viewers disappeared the previous week, according to reported the Washington Post. Many other users have also expressed frustration at the persistent harassment with #TwitchDoBetter .
Twitch has tried to address these concerns in some way, however, it seems that it still fails to control hate incidents, despite having updated its own harassment and hate content policy to explicitly ban hate groups and stricter sexual harassment, among other changes.