On Sept. 9, WIRED reported that Twitch resorted to taking legal action to combat the hate raids that have been plaguing the platform in recent months. According to the report, Twitch sued two alleged raiders for “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content.”
Over the past month, hate raids have increased significantly on Twitch with little direct intervention from the site, until now. Unhappy with the platform’s apparent inaction, fed-up streamers and community members took matters into their own hands by developing tools to combat targeted harassment from raids. On Sept. 1, people were encouraged to take part in the #ADayOffTwitch protest as a way to encourage the company to step up in an official capacity and expand on its guidelines for managing harassment.
A Twitch spokesperson provided WIRED with a statement on the lawsuit.
“We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community,” the Twitch spokesperson said.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and targets two alleged raiders who identify as “Cruzzcontrol” and “CreatineOverdose,” believed to be based in the Netherlands and Vienna, Austria, respectively. According to the lawsuit, Twitch first took “swift action” against these users by permanently banning their accounts. However, these individuals tried to evade bans by creating new accounts and altering the code used to initiate their hate raids.
Both Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose still own a variety of accounts on Twitch under different names. Twitch alleges that 3,000 of Cruzzcontrol’s bots have been identified in recent hate raids and, as stated in the suit, the two users claim they have the ability to “generate thousands of bots in minutes for this purpose.” On Aug. 15, according to the suit, CreatineOverdose proved how their bots “could be used to spam Twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic descriptions of violence against minorities and claims that the hate raiders are the ‘KKK.'”
The lawsuit alleged that both users may be members of an organized hate raiding community that uses Discord and Steam to coordinate attacks on streamers.
