YouTube star IShowSpeed suddenly ended his broadcast on October 11 after racist trolls bombarded the stream with hateful and offensive donation messages.
IShowSpeed is a bonafide YouTube superstar. The young internet personality first gained fame on Twitch, and has since dominated viewership on YouTube, even surpassing the likes of Dr Disrespect and Ludwig.
However, online stardom isn’t without its pitfalls. IShowSpeed has encountered quite a few hateful trolls during his time in the limelight — including getting swatted during a broadcast back in August.
Most recently, Speed was the target of hateful donation messages during a live stream on October 11, and fans are sending their support following the shocking incident.
IShowSpeed ends broadcast after receiving racist donation messages
On many live streaming platforms, fans can donate money to their favorite broadcasters. Alongside this donation, they can also attach a message, which is often read aloud by a text-to-speech program for streamers to respond to.
Speed was just about to boot up a GTA session when he received a SuperChat donation from a viewer pretending to be MrBeast, another creator with whom Speed had FaceTimed earlier this month.
Their donation message contained hateful and racist remarks, prompting Speed to shout in frustration and get up from his PC.
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Despite the incident, Speed returned to his setup and continued to interact with his chat — but he abruptly ended the broadcast after receiving another racist donation message from a troll.
“No way you just donated that,” the streamer remarked after reading the offensive note. “Yep, uh… I’m not doing that s**t.” The stream ended shortly thereafter.
Now, fans are flooding the VOD’s comments section with support for the streamer, who has not commented on the issue at the time of writing.
Streaming platforms have, historically, had issues with racist trolls; in fact, users started a campaign to combat racist hate brigades on Twitch back in 2021 after the site became inundated with hateful trolls using bots to attack people of color.
This latest incident proves that streaming sites still have a lot of work to do to protect broadcasters from racism on their platforms.
