Twitch is suing two users for their part in the hate raids that have targeted streamers, specifically People of Color and LGBTQIA+ streamers, as of late.
This news comes by way of WIRED, which reports that Twitch filed the lawsuit yesterday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuit has been filed against two Twitch users, Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose, and the company believes them to be from the Netherlands and Vienna, Austria, respectively.
No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for. This is not the community we want on Twitch, and we want you to know we are working hard to make Twitch a safer place for creators. https://t.co/fDbw62e5LW
— Twitch (@Twitch) August 20, 2021
"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," a Twitch spokesperson told WIRED.
Twitch is specifically suing these two users for breaking the site's Terms of Service by creating fake bot accounts and using them to harass streamers.
This lawsuit comes about a month after the hate raids ramped up on the video streaming service Twitch. The company has responded to these attacks by creating new chat filters aimed at filtering out would-be hate raid chat messages, and WIRED writes that Twitch "has been building 'channel-level ban evasion detection,'" as well. Twitch says it has banned thousands of accounts they deem responsible, in part, for these raids too.
Twitch also banned the two users it's now suing, but it says the two users got around that ban by "creating new, alternate Twitch accounts, and continually altering their self-described 'hate raid code' to avoid detection and suspension by Twitch," according to the lawsuit. The two are accused of being part of a "hate raiding community" that coordinates attacks over private channels on Discord, Steam, and elsewhere.
The complaint explains that the two users being sued use multiple Twitch accounts and thousands of bot accounts to create the hate raids. It also says Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose can "generate thousands of bots in minutes” for these hate raids, citing that Cruzzcontrol alone is behind about 3000 bots.
Twitch's lawsuit details how CreatineOverdose, Cruzzcontrol, and 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.'"
News of this lawsuit comes just over a week after Twitch streamers organized a boycott in protest of these hate raids and Twitch’s response to them. That boycott, which formally occurred on September 1 under the "#ADayOffTwitch" hashtag, resulted in anywhere between a 5% to 15% drop in views across the site.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.