Twitch has launched legal action against two users wo the streaming platform claims are at least partly responsible for the infamous “hate raids” plaguing the site.
From August 2021 onwards, Twitch has been subjected to many ‘hate raids,’ where bots spam hateful and racist terms in a streamer’s chat. While the company claimed to have banned many accounts at the end of that month, they have now filed a lawsuit against two users they believe have been posting some of the hate messages.
According to a report in WIRED, Twitch is suing the pair for “targeting Black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content in violation of its terms of service.”
A spokesperson for Twitch said: “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 two users have been identified by their usernames as ‘Cruzzcontrol’ and ‘CreatineOverdose’ in court documents, which were filed on September 9. The Amazon-owned site believes they are based in the Netherlands and Austria, respectively.
Despite the streaming platform claiming they took “swift action” by banning both of the users’ main accounts, the suit states that they “evaded Twitch’s bans by creating new, alternate Twitch accounts, and continually altering their self-described ‘hate raid code’ to avoid detection and suspension by Twitch.”
Twitch also suggests in the lawsuit that the defendants may be part of a “hate raiding community,” which coordinates the raids over Discord and Steam.
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The lawsuit goes on to claim that Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose still operate multiple accounts on Twitch under different names, as well as thousands of bot accounts to spam streamers.
Furthermore, according to Twitch, both users have claimed that they can “generate thousands of bots in minutes for this purpose.” Twitch alleges that Cruzzcontrol is responsible for about 3,000 bots associated with the recent hate raids.
While it hasn’t been revealed what, if anything, the company is seeking in damages, WIRED report that the new suit could help uncover the identities of the two anonymous users that Twitch claim are behind the raids.
