The social media page for Twitch has just posted a response to the #TwitchDoBetter movement after the hashtag trended on Twitter on Wednesday. Twitch is the largest live streaming platform on the internet, hosting millions of users across the globe and allowing streamers like Ludwig to raise millions of dollars. However, this popularity is a double-edged sword for both the platform and its streamers, as a bigger population means less scrutiny toward each user and their actions.
The #TwitchDoBetter movement started as a response to the reported lack of moderation around sexist, racist, and homophobic hate speech on the platform. One such issue is known as "hate raids," wherein large hate groups will use bots to target specific streamers of marginalized groups, especially people of color, and harass them en masse in the stream's chat. Other users have reported follow-botting becoming a more frequent occurrence against those same groups of people, where users will send thousands of bots to artificially inflate a streamer's follower count.
After the hashtag started trending on Twitter, Twitch finally responded to the public outrage in a series of Tweets that go over the main issues at hand and provide what seems to be the first of many updates to the platform to combat recent attacks. "We were 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. We'll keep updating this to address emerging issues." While fixes are stated to be underway, the replies to the company's post are still filling with more and more documented examples of harassment and hate speech on Twitch. Hundreds of streamers like CriticalBard have previously shared their stories and complaints about Twitch's ignorance toward the most glaring issues.
Read Twitch's response on Twitter here.
Previously, hate groups could circumvent the speech filters on Twitch by simply doubling up a letter in the banned word or phrase, allowing for numerous racist comments to flood unsuspecting streamers. The update to the filters just rolled out has no specifics given so it's still not certain how effective this update will be. Twitch goes on to state that channel-level ban evasion detection and improvements to account verification will be coming later this year, an effort the platform hopes will cut down on sitewide bot activity.
This news comes at a time when Twitch is already under fire for decisions on the site. The previous decisions surrounding what was dubbed as Twitch's "hot tub meta" left most involved unsatisfied. Either way, streamers have made it very clear that this level of freedom for hate speech on such a big platform is a major issue, and only by listening to these targeted creators can Twitch hope to recover and improve.
Source: Twitch/Twitter, CriticalBard/Twitter
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