Twitch Investigates Anti-LGBTQ “Hate Raid”

Twitch replied last week to a recent surge of “hate raids” against LGBTQ users and women on the platform. While this isn’t the first time members of the community have been attacked with hostile tweets, Dot Esports says that the attacks this time came via a third-party platform.

Twitch Support has acknowledged the attacks and stated that it will respond by suspending disruptive Twitch accounts and instructing streamers on how to prevent incursions. 

Twitch Support posted to Twitter on Friday; “[B]ad actors have been coordinating off-Twitch to target women and LGBTQ+ members of our community with spammy and hateful chat messages. Hate has no place on Twitch, and we’ve identified and suspended the Twitch accounts of the individuals participating.” 

Individuals on Cozy.tv were accused of promoting “hate raids” and restreamed several users’ broadcasts while mocking them, according to streamers. 

Cozy.tv is a conservative streaming website co-founded by white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has previously been banned from Twitch, Reddit and Youtube. Fuentes, who took credit for the raid in a statement, recently hosted a white nationalist gathering at which he appeared to praise Adolf Hitler, saying, “Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler – they say that’s not a good thing.” 

Following the #ADayOffTwitch boycott of the service by Black and LGBTQ Twitch streamers in protest of prior “hate raids,” Twitch sued the accused offenders in an attempt to prevent them from returning to the platform in September 2021. 

In the 2021 attack, comments included “racial slurs, personal identifying information, descriptions of violence against marginalized communities and links to gore videos,” Buzzfeed News reports.

“We may never be able to fix Twitch,” Omega “Critical Bard” Jones, a queer Black Twitch streamer who has faced constant harassment on the platform, told the Washington Post, “but we can absolutely have an immediate effect on the culture around us, and that will at least provide a little bit more safety for people.”