Twitch pursues two suspected “hate looters”

After months of battling a tidal wave of harassment campaigns targeting marginalized streamers, Twitch filed a lawsuit against two alleged “hate raiders”.

First reported by WIRED, the complaint, filed yesterday in the Federal Court of the United States, names two defendants, CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, and alleges that they are partly responsible for the wave of “hate raids” that has plagued Twitch since early August. In the lawsuit, Twitch said that:

CruzzControl is responsible for nearly 3,000 bot accounts associated with hate raids. Bots developed and deployed by CruzzControl have been linked to various hate raid events, including those targeting black and LGBTQIA + streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist, and other content. CruzzControl has admitted to using bots to flood Twitch channels with harassing content. They also demonstrated how bots work so that others can use similar methods to accomplish hate raids. Twitch also linked CreatineOverdose directly to the hate raids. For example, on August 15, 2021, the accused CreatineOverdose used his bot software to demonstrate how it could be used to spam Twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic descriptions of violence against minorities and claim that the looters of hate are the “KK K”.

CreatineOverdose was one of the first accounts that streamers identified as responsible for hate raids, and there is at least one incident where CreatineOverdose admitted to being an author in a streamer’s chat.

The lawsuit doesn’t identify any of the defendants beyond their Twitch usernames, but says both reside in Europe.

Hate raids occur when malicious actors use bots and the raid feature to spam streamers’ chats with racist, transphobic, and homophobic messages. Hateful raids have been taking place on the platform for a while, but incidents have recently exploded out of control, with black, brown-haired, gay and trans streamers taking the majority of the attacks. In response, streamers and members of the Twitch community created their own resources to fight hate raids while verbally criticizing Twitch for not doing more or for not acting quickly enough to protect its users.

On September 1, streamer ShineyPen hosted A Day Off Twitch, which asked users not to stream or watch Twitch for a day in order to draw attention to the issue. Twitch has responded to the calls to action with several updates to its security features and the promise that more action is on the way. This costume is part of this action. A Twitch spokesperson said:

Yesterday, Twitch filed a lawsuit in the United States Federal Court against people involved in the recent chat attacks against marginalized streamers. The malicious actors involved were highly motivated to violate our terms of service, creating new waves of fake bot accounts designed to harass creators even as we continually update our site-wide protections against their behavior by rapid evolution. Although we have identified and banned thousands of accounts in the past few weeks, these players continue to work hard to find creative ways around our improvements and show no intention of stopping. We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools they exploit, deter them from engaging in similar behaviors with other services, and help end these vile attacks on members. of our community.

This complaint is by no means the only action we have taken to deal with targeted attacks, and it will not be the last. Our teams have worked tirelessly to update our proactive detection systems, address new behaviors as they emerge and finalize new proactive security tools across the channels we’ve been developing for months. Hate and harassment have no place on Twitch, and we know we still have a lot of work to do, but we hope these combined actions will help reduce the immediate and unacceptable damage that targeted attacks have inflicted on our community. community.

While hate raids still occur on Twitch, affected users view this costume positively. Lucia Everblack, one of the organizers of #ADayOffTwitch, thinks this is a good step. “It obviously doesn’t solve the larger issues of how this continues to happen, but sends the message that the people who do can be found. “

Another streamer who started the Hate Raid Response website – a place where streamers can use and share tools, programs, and advice on how to prevent or stop hate raids – said: “It’s a step in the right direction and for the big gaming community: accountability Nothing on the internet is actually anonymous and there are real consequences to the things you say and do.