Mychal ‘Trihex’ Jefferson is one of the faces of Twitch — literally. However, the man behind the TriHard emote has become a target for “hate raids” on the platform, so he’s called on Twitch to implement solutions fast.
Hate raids have taken over Twitch. While issues with bots brigading chats and hurling racist and homophobic abuse at streamers has been prevalent for years, it’s exploded into an epidemic in August 2021.
Streamers have rallied behind the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter, and are even planning a boycott on September 1.
For Trihex, it’s a topic he knows all too well. As one of the faces of Twitch and the man behind the TriHard emote, which is being used in the raids, he has been subjected to racial abuse on the platform for years.
Now, those botters targeting smaller streamers are flooding his own chat. After experiencing his first hate raid on August 22, he called on Twitch to “fix this sooner rather than later.”
Well I see what these hate raids are all about, having experienced one myself just now.
We gotta fix this sooner rather than later, huh @Twitch? pic.twitter.com/Av3eUebXN1
— trihex @ fitness (17.0% body fat) (@trihex) August 22, 2021
“I’m no stranger to being called these hateful things but not everyone is accustomed to dealing with it,” he said.
“A small streamer with no mod team getting invaded by tens or hundreds of bots and having to ban the bot accounts manually — one at a time — can be traumatizing.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
“The most we can do natively (outside of third-party tools) is turn on sub mode and individually nuke accounts and then enable follower-only until things stabilize.”
While Twitch has promised action on the issue, the platform’s current “archaic” model won’t tide streamers over for months, or even weeks, of harassment. Instead, he wants them to “nuke all vulnerabilities” and implement action now — starting with two-factor authentication.
This minimizes the trauma of reading all this trash, cleans it up quickly for those without large mod teams, and seems like a "low-lift/high-impact" type of action to help out the most vulnerable at this time.
More on Twitch 2FA: https://t.co/sAR670pVh7
— trihex @ fitness (17.0% body fat) (@trihex) August 23, 2021
“I advocate a two-factor authentication toggle be added — only 2FA accounts can send messages. Add a separate option for broadcasters to choose if any posts from non-2FA (bots) get deleted upon toggle as well.”
“This minimizes the trauma of reading all this trash, cleans it up quickly for those without large mod teams, and seems like a ‘low-lift-high-impact’ type of action to help out the most vulnerable at this time.”
Twitch promised on August 20 that they are working on “solutions” to the hate raid problem, specifically revolving around ban evasion and improving their banned word filters.
