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Despite being one of the largest streaming platforms, streamers went on a strike today called “A Day Off Twitch” to protest the website’s lack of action in the face of harassment.
The latest blunder follows the new trend of “Hate raids”, wherein Black and trans streamers were being flooded by bots spamming slurs and other profanities, followed by no action on Twitch’s part.
Worse still, thanks to Twitch terms of service, some users were reporting facing disciplinary action for not clearing their chat quickly enough, as if it were their fault for being targeted in the first place. This also applied to streamers who were offline, with advisory messages circulating to put their chats in Emotes-Only mode to avoid being penalized for not moderating chat even when they’re not workign.
The protest was started by three streamers: ShineyPen, RekItRaven and Lucia Everblack, with the trio having called for the boycott as early as late August.
In addition to announcing the protest, the movement had published a convenient infographic highlighting their demands from A Day Off Twitch:
The demands are pretty straightforward- chief of them, the movement is asking for Twitch to hold a roundtable with marginalized creators, and actually listen to the problems they’re facing. From there, they’re also asking for more comprehensive tools to deal with abuse, as well as more proactive measures to prevent these from happening in future- such as limiting the number of accounts created from the same email address.
Streamer iamBrandon catalogued meticulously his experience of being hate raided, showing how the bots bypass Twitch’s own slur filters and how even settings like putting chat in Followers-Only mode aren’t effective when bots simply mass-follow. (Content warning, there are screenshots of aforementioned slurs in the thread).
How Twitch Is Handling A Day Off Twitch
Despite having made the news, Twitch hasn’t officially responded to the protest on their social media account since A Day Off Twitch started. That being said, the website has taken some action.
The first thing Twitch has done is delay the launch of Subtember, the annual sale of subscription to Twitch streamers, to September 2nd. They’d also published a new page about combating harassment on Twitch, which is entirely void of any action on their own part, instead telling people to do things like clear chat and install automod, as if streamers had just been sitting around taking the harassment this whole time and not meticulously trying to deal with it, like iamBrandon described.
Another streamer, Coach, also made a script to ban these bots, showing just how intense the hate raids can be and rebutting all arguments that this could be solved with moderators:
They also issued a statement to PC Gamer:
“We support our streamers’ rights to express themselves and bring attention to important issues across our service,” Twitch said in a statement emailed to PC Gamer. “No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for, and we are working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators.”
Too Little, Too Late (Editorial)
Considering how much of successful streaming is community interaction Twitch is doing a poor job of supporting their streamers. Having had a whole week to prepare for the protest and having little more than “just limit your Chat and stop being harassed” as your big solution is, in all honesty, terrible crisis management.
The fact Twitch can’t even directly say what the problem is- never once name-dropping the marginalized communities involved- is exactly why A Day Off Twitch needed to happen. Black and trans creators are veterans of being harassed, thanks to Twitch’s inaction for years. They don’t need a webpage to tell them to hire moderators, they need actual support as outlined in the A Day Off Twitch demands.
Meanwhile this whole ordeal has been a good example of communities coming together to fix something that the platform owners simply won’t. Coach Steve put out a video full of resources showing how to use the script showcased earlier in the article to automatically ban bots.
