Twitch announces new features to curb ‘hate raids’

Following an upswell in qualified harassment on the streaming platform Twitch, an structured boycott of the website on the section of customers, and a lawsuit to go after two alleged harassers, Twitch has announced the new steps it is taking to secure end users against qualified harassment on the platform, such as a new attribute: mobile phone-confirmed chat. The new settings will permit streamers to involve that “some or all customers validate a cellular phone variety in advance of chatting,” Twitch advised Polygon Wednesday. The new functions will also unroll on Wednesday.

“Curbing this style of behavior is, and will proceed to be, a best precedence for us,” a blog site put up from the firm claimed. “We’re optimistic that this will have a substantial influence on curbing any form of chat-primarily based harassment, like targeted bot assaults,” a consultant stated to Polygon via e mail.

Creators will also be able to insert an e mail-confirmed chat as properly, and they’ll be in a position to tailor their chat rules in accordance to unique expectations. For case in point, creators can set it so that that only end users who have been adhering to beneath a specific period of time require to be verified.

The strategy, per Twitch’s account of how the attribute will work, is that the cellphone-verified chat will make it extra tricky for poor actors to evade channel bans by creating a new account. With the function, customers will be capable to validate up to 5 accounts with a single telephone amount.

Ahead of this announcement, Twitch also took authorized action versus at the very least two accounts it had determined as remaining at the rear of the attacks. It experienced not yet declared expanded security characteristics at the time.

All these steps come following a rise in harassment campaigns targeting creators on the system. The aforementioned “bot attacks” refer to a harassment method known as “hate raids,” by way of which destructive actors use the platform’s “raid” functionality to flood a creator’s chat with hateful messages, frequently employing bot accounts.

What began as a hashtag to elevate consciousness turned into an organized boycott named “ADayOffTwitch” that identified as on streamers to not stream for an overall day, which created a dent in viewership numbers on the Amazon-owned streaming internet site.