Two Alleged Hate Raiders Sued By Twitch

Two Alleged Hate Raiders Sued By Twitch – After months of harassment at marginalized streamers on twitch, the company finally sues two of the persons allegedly involved in the incidents.

Two Alleged Hate Raiders Sued By Twitch

Two Alleged Hate Raiders Sued By Twitch

A suit was filed yesterday in the US federal court and was first reported by wired. The suit names two defendants, CreatineOverdose and CruzzControl alleging the two were the ones responsible for the hate raids that have plagued the twitch platform since the beginning of August. The company twitch said in the lawsuit that:

“CruzzControl is responsible for nearly 3,000 bot accounts associated with hate raids. Bots developed and deployed by CruzzControl have been linked to various hate raid events, including those targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist, and other harassing content. CruzzControl has admitted to using bots to flood twitch channels with harassing content. They have also demonstrated how the bots work so others can use similar methods to accomplish hate raids. Twitch has also linked CreatineOverdose directly to hate raids. For example, on August 15th, 2021,  defendant creatineOverdose used their bot software to demonstrate how it could be used to spam twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic descriptions of violence against minorities, and claims that the hate raiders are the “KKK.”

One of the first accounts identified to be responsible for the hate raids was CreatineOverdose. And also there is at least one incident where CreatineOverdose has admitted to being the culprit in a streamer’s chat. The suit however only identifies the users by their username and that alone but it also does say that they both reside in Europe.

When Hate Raids Happen

When do these hate raids even start, one may ask? Well, these hate raids start when malicious users weaponize bots and the raid feature to spam the chats of streamers with racist, homophobic and transphobic messages. This is not the first time hate raids are taking place on twitch. But this time the issue has really gone out of hand with queer, black, brown, and Trans streamers being targeted.

In response to this, however, the twitch community and streamers on the platforms have created their own resources in combating these hate raids. They have also openly criticized the platform for not doing enough to protect its users.

What Twitch Had to Say

Streamer ShineyPen organized a day off twitch on September 1st. he asked streamers to stay off the platform for a day in a bid to bring the attention of the platform to the problem. In response, twitch updated its safety features and promise to take more action. A spokesperson from twitch said:

“Yesterday, twitch filed a complaint in U.S. federal court against individuals involved in the recent chat-based attacks against marginalized streamers. The malicious actors involved have been highly motivated in breaking our terms of service, creating new waves of fake bots accounts designed to harass creators even as we continually update our site-wide protections against their rapidly evolving behaviors. While we have identified and banned thousands of accounts over the past weeks, these actors continue to work hard on creative ways to circumvent our improvements, and show no intention of stopping. We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community.

This complaint is by no means the only action we’ve taken to address targeted attacks, nor will it be the last. Our teams have been working around the clock to update our proactive detection systems, address new behaviors as they emerge, and finalize new proactive, channel-level safety tools that we’ve been developing for months. Hate and harassment have no place on twitch, and we know we have a lot of work to do but we hope that these combined actions will help reduce the immediate and unacceptable harm that targeted attacks have been inflicting on our community.”

Conclusion

Hate raids are still happening on twitch. And even with that users that are affected see this suit as a positive thing. One of the organizers of #ADayOffTwitch, Lucia Everblack thinks that this is a good step. In her words, “it obviously doesn’t address the larger issues about how this still continues to happen but does send a message that the people doing it can be found.”

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