After a flood of ‘hate-raiding’, Twitch responds to calls to do more for marginalized streamers

As if Twitch chat wasn’t bad enough already, in the last year or so it’s been rendered even worse by what’s called ‘hate-raiding’, which is when a streamer’s chat is invaded by a group of users all spamming the same hateful messages. They might call for gay people to be publicly executed, or declare that a channel belongs to the KKK. That last one was directed at a streamer called Rek It Raven, who then asked for Twitch to provide better tools to combat hate-raiding and other attacks on marginalized streamers with the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter. In response, streamers who used the hashtag were targeted for another round of hate-raids, #TwitchDoBetter repeated back at them along with reams of insults or just the N-word repeated over and over.

“I started it because in a week I got hate-raided twice,” says Raven, who streams horror games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Phasmophobia. “Then I started talking about it, and more people that were in marginalized communities or in marginalized groups were really saying, ‘Hey, this happened to me too.’ I’m unfortunately used to getting some form of hate—I am a queer, femme-presenting person of color, I am a very easy target—but this was more than just the ‘You’re black, you’re fat, you’re gay’ stuff. These attacks were very pointed. “