Digital Media Concepts/Twitch Hate Raids

In Spring of 2021 Hate Raids and Follow Raids become a significantly more prominent, and significantly more detrimental occurrence on streaming websites such as Twitch.tv. These Raids consist of, respectively, many users flooding a Creators chat with hate slurs, general hate speech and bigotry, or a multitude of thousands of bot accounts flooding Creators notifications with follow alerts. Due to the Terms of Service about being a Creator on Twitch, these Raids are incredibly detrimental to the Creator. Creators can be banned for “boosting” their following using bots and banned for the occurrences that happen within their chats.

What are Raid/Follow bots

These raids are separated in to two categories, Hate raids and Follow Raids. Hate raids are usually conducted by users handling bots to find targets, Follow Raids are entirely bot controlled and happen to be one of the most detrimental things that could happen on the Platform. These Bots who are programmed for the raids come in the thousands, sometimes its lower but more commonly they come in number exceeding 5000. They are all fake accounts made to do one task, and many share the same names or variations of the same name. Commonly known as "hoss"bots these bots will randomly follow a user at the beginning of a stream, and if the creator is lucky nothing more will happen. However, on the chance that more does happy, on a later date these bots and others of many names will swarm the creator with thousands of follows. These raids are detrimental not only to the Creator themselves but to the content being created, as this falsifies the creators follower count and floods their notifications so that any actual community growth can not be noticed. Some known bot name Variations are "anotherttvviewer" "0x(insert variation here)" and "painhatesad(insert variation here)

How to Combat Raids/Bots

The best way to combat these Raids, is to stop them before the can start at all and handle the bots before they can act. There are three ways of doing this, and its best to do all of them. The first way to combat bots is to go to CommanderRoot and ban all existing bots in the websites "blocklist manager", be warned this may take some time as there are more than 400 thousand known bots. The second way is to visit Sery.bot, which was a bot created and designed in order to ban the "hoss" bots upon their arrival in your stream. All directions for enabling Sery are located within its Bio/About Me sections of its page. The third, final, and least effective option, is to handle the bots through your own capabilities and those of your mods. This option is the least effective because there is only so much that a few people can do against a literal army of entities. However, once the first two actions are taken, the third becomes much easier to handle as it slows a tsunami to a mere trickle.

How Twitch has combated the Raids

Though in the larger scheme of things Twitch has done little to protect the users creating content on their platform, on thing they have done is file a lawsuit against a pair of the most prominent offenders. Twitch claims to be working to update their detection system, but to little avail. In this regard, many Creators on the platform organized the #dayoftwitch tag in protest of the companies lack of decisive action. Also to this regard, the Community of Twitch has already shown to be many times more proactive than the Devs have been, creating things such as Sery.bot and CommanderRoot in order to assist other users of the platform.

External Links

https://www.dexerto.com/guides/what-is-a-twitch-raid-everything-you-need-to-know-1638999/ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/what-are-hoss-bot-accounts-on-twitch-rampant-follow-bots-explained-1651029/ https://twitchbots.info/bots https://www.twitch.tv/sery_bot https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de