Twitch has been battling botmakers for a decade. Both users, the complaint says, claim they can “generate thousands of bots in minutes” to raid streamers. And attached to each of those accounts are countless bots. Twitch alleges that the two users it’s suing, for example, operate multiple Twitch accounts under different aliases. “The challenge right now is that bad actors can create additional accounts in order to evade bans,” says Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice president of Trust & Safety. The trouble with bot attacks is that Twitch can’t just ban one or one hundred accounts associated with these raids and be done with it. The suit claims that these individuals, who have not yet been identified, violated its terms of service by “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content.” Shortly after the boycott, Twitch sued two users who allegedly perpetrated raids. The hashtag #TwitchDoBetter has also been popular on Twitter.

At the beginning of September, thousands of streamers and their supporters organized a one-day boycott, #ADayOffTwitch, to protest the attacks and raise awareness. The disruptive attacks have spurred two large-scale social media protests and a lawsuit so far in response. Sometimes, they were forced to stop streaming on Twitch altogether. Streamers impacted by hate raids spoke out about the damage it has caused their channels. There, the bot accounts spam hateful, bigoted language, sometimes using unicode that evades hate speech filters. The feature comes on the heels of an epidemic of bot attacks, dubbed “hate raids,” in which harassers send hundreds or thousands of bots into streamers’ chatrooms. The news, initially leaked through source code, was first reported by Twitch watchdog Zach Bussey. This extra step could help cut down on harassment from accounts that aren’t even human, the thinking goes. Starting today, streamers globally will be able to require other users to verify their phone number via SMS before they can participate in the chat. Twitch is introducing a new tool that the company believes will mitigate bot attacks wreaking havoc in chatrooms on the video game streaming site. Amid a rise in harassment campaigns carried out by automated bots, companies like Twitch are resorting to a more targeted approach-less “ban hammer,” and more like a bunch of little ban daggers.

Twitch bot account