Twitch streamers have come together to ask the platform to do better. The hashtag #DoBetterTwitch began circulating on Twitter with streamers sharing their horrible experiences of being targeted for harassment.
Most recently, female and minority streamers have been subjected to bot-fueled "hate raids," where a swarm of bots all invade a streamer's channel to start spamming the chat with hateful slurs or comments. You can see an example of this courtesy of Critical Bard, who shared a particularly ugly raid on social media.
There's a lot more going on, and Kotaku has a pretty good write-up about the whole situation.
Twitch has since responded to the #DoBetterTwitch campaign and acknowledged that it "needs to do more" to combat hate and harassment.
"We’ve seen a lot of conversation about botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalized creators," wrote Twitch in a series of tweets. “You’re asking us to do better, and we know we need to do more to address these issues.”
Related: Twitch Will Now Tell Suspended Users What They Did Wrong
Thanks to the campaign, Twitch was "able to identify a vulnerability in our proactive filters, and have rolled out an update to close this gap and better detect hate speech in chat."
Additionally, Twitch said that it will launch a "channel-level ban evasion detection and account verification improvements later this year," and it would be "reaching out to community members to learn about their experiences." In the meantime, Twitch encourages streamers to share their experiences via its Uservoice feedback system.
This isn't the first time Twitch has come under fire for allowing hate and harassment to run rampant on its platform. In 2020, Twitch's own analysis found it took action on only 15% of user-generated reports–an appallingly low number given the sheer volume it receives annually. As such, the company announced it would be hiring an outside law firm to investigate these reports and work with local law enforcement.
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