There has been a recent uptick in streamers reporting follow botting, chat bots, users raiding other creators with hateful intent, and other harassment on Twitch over the last several days. In response, the platform has confirmed updates that will work to prevent things like this from continuing to impact streamers moving forward.
Twitch initially noted that it was able to identify an area where the platform’s proactive filters were vulnerable to abuse. An update has already been rolled out that will better detect hate speech in streamers’ chats.
Additionally, the developers are working on finally launching channel-level ban evasion detection and account verification improvements at some point later this year.
Ban evasion has been a hot topic on Twitch for some time now, with creators banning individuals that are being harmful, hateful, or negative from chat, only for those same users to make another account and continue their poor behavior. Any improvements to avoid this will likely tie into the account verification changes, but Twitch did not mention any specifics.
As for hate raids, the update to hate speech detection should help mitigate the issue until Twitch can find a better method to prevent it. Users who organize hateful and harmful raids are typically given warnings or banned outright already. That, however, doesn’t stop random accounts from spamming hateful messages in chat and then creating new accounts to continue doing so once they are banned.
For now, Twitch support is still pointing users being affected by hateful users, spam, or other issues to the “Managing Harassment” page, which lists features and tools currently available to help combat those instances.
