Twitch streams getting invaded by people that might not have a streamer's best intentions at heart are not a new thing, but hate raids are something relatively new and worse than what came before. The platform has been blamed for the rise in these hate raids because it's not doing enough to stop them in the eyes of many creators and viewers. Some of that blame lies in the fact that Twitch has long been accused of having double standards with regards to how some streamers are treated, though to some degree, the service hasn't done nearly enough when it comes to the rise in hate raids.
These specific hate raids are when someone uses the raid mechanism to abuse a Twitch streamer. Instead of someone's organic audience, a streamer’s chat is flooded with all kinds of hateful messages, usually from bot accounts. This in turn becomes difficult to deal with for streamers on their own because they (and/or their channel mods) have to try and ban hundreds of fake, bot-generated accounts at a time. This slows things down in the regular day-to-day operations while adding truly offensive and hurtful messages to the mix.
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After weeks and months of streamers dealing with these hate raids largely by themselves, the platform deserves some credit for addressing Twitch hate raids once it was clear they were a growing problem. However, many streamers that have been affected by these raids don't believe the service is doing enough, and there have been several who have spoken out that Twitch's comprehensive actions aren't fast enough.
The accusation of Twitch having double standards has been going on for years, but as smaller streamers continue to get hit with hate raids, some claim the platform works quicker when it comes to bigger streamers. However, even some well-known personalities on the platform have started talking out more about the number of Twitch hate raids they've had to endure. One such streamer is Blessing Adeoye Jr. from Kinda Funny. He recently took to Twitter to point out Twitch first talked about how they were going to deal with this problem near the beginning of August. He said that since that promise, he's personally been hate raided three times.
More and more users have come to the realization that Twitch has to do better when it comes to stopping users who are only on the service to harass others. Part of the problem is that the people who are organizing these hate raids are doing so at other places.
While streamers are demanding that Twitch do better in controlling the hate raids, some of the situations and examples of hate raids are out of its control. When harassers meet and plan a hate raid on sites like Discord, it's not something Twitch mods can monitor easily or put a stop to with a few keystrokes.
However, Twitch has introduced tools it says are geared toward trying to stop people who are only on the platform to abuse and harass others. Some say those tools haven't put much of a dent into the flow of hate, and there are still others that believe the service isn't cracking down because it doesn't want to boot users off its platform since being able to boast a big subscriber base can conceivably help on the business side. For its part, the higher-ups at Twitch have largely said they're doing everything they can to stop the spamming of chats with hateful messages, and that future effort will do an even better job of taking care of those offenders.
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