Twitch Responds To #TwitchDoBetter

Streaming platform Twitch recently responded to the ‘Twitch Do Better’ movement with improved chat filters and fixed a vulnerability that allowed trolls to circumvent chat filters.

Twitch recently issued a statement announcing the steps they are taking to protect their marginalized streamers. Twitch says that they’ve seen a lot of conversations about hate raids, botting, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalized creators and people are asking them to take action and to do better and they know they need to do more to address the said issues.

Also, Twitch says that it’s identified a vulnerability in their proactive filters and rolled out an update to close this gap and detect better hate speech in chat. Twitch also says that they will implement more features regarding safety in the coming weeks and that includes improvements to the verification to the account process and detection tools in ban evasion.

Twitch released statement is their response to the hashtag circulating #twitchdobetter, which was started by RekItRaven and said that it is to bring awareness to the harassment issues that black creators were experiencing on Twitch.

Twitch content creator Raven says that she was haet raided for the 2nd timeina week and she shared first and both occurrence of Twitter because tehy were pointed rather than the normal “You’re blach, fat, gay stuff”.

One of Twitch’s features is raiding where it allows a streamer to send their viewers to another streamer at the end of their stream. It is a tool used to boost viewership, foster connections between streamers and their viewers, and grow communities. On the other hand, Hate Raidsare the toxic opposite and polar. Also, in hate raids, a streamer direct their treamers to another streamerand is Female, balck, Queer, or has an intersection of marginalizedidentities, in order to give the other streamer with hate speech and harassement.

Raven believes that they are being targeted because they are using the new feature of Twitch that allows them to classify their stream with different marks like the ‘Black tag’. These tags are used by the streamer to categorize their stream so that interested viewers can see them easily but it is also used by trolls to attract marginalized streamers. After experiencing hate raids, Raven also noticed that she isn’t the only experiencing hate raids and realized that other marginalized streamers are experiencing the same thing. With no word and action from Twitch, Reven decided to re-open the conversation and started the #twitchdobetter and said that she is tired of having to fight to exist on a platform that says that they are inclusive and diverse but remained silent to the pleas of its marginalized creators who are asking for more protection from hate raids.

Streaming platform Twitch is struggling to keep off the toxicity on its platform and recently, they have been reactive to the needs of their users rather than proactive that result in frustration. Better, they are being more proactive by updating a new feature and moderation tool that Marginalized streamers asked.

Raven added that she’d love to see creators have more tools to control their experience like allowing its creators to block accounts from chatting and allowing mods to approve or decline raids.