Over the last few months a new scourge has emerged on Twitch in which people of colour, LGBTQIA and other groups of people have become the target of so-called hate raids.
The problem reached breaking point earlier this month when streamers took a day off of streaming in a bid to force Twitch to do more. Last week it started doing more.
In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Twitch has “named” two alleged perpetrators of hate raids on its platform.
We say “named” because Twitch has yet to identify the alleged raiders by name despite knowing their Twitch handles. Those two handles are CruzzControl who reportedly resides in the Netherlands and CreatineOverdose who reportedly resides in Austria. We should point out that both accused have used different handles in the past.
The lawsuit alleges that both CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose have used bots to flood Twitch channels with hatred.
“August 15, 2021, Defendant CreatineOverdose used their bot software to demonstrate how it could be used to spam Twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic descriptions of violence against minorities, and claims that the hate raiders are the ‘K K K.’ Bots used in this demonstration contain unique usernames that Twitch later detected as being used to spam similar violent hate speech in numerous other Twitch channels,” reads the lawsuit.
Despite having banned both accounts permanently the hate raids continued and both alleged perpetrators are believed to have enabled this. Furthermore, Twitch accuses the two of continuing to develop their software.
Twitch is asking the court to bar CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose from accessing its services, as well as restitution and damages that include costs.
You can find the full lawsuit here as a PDF.
[Via – Ars Technica]
