After targeted harassment incidents surged on the streaming media platform Twitch, users systematically boycotted the site, and filed a lawsuit against two suspected harassers, Twitch announced that it is protecting users from targeted harassment on the platform. The new measures taken include a new feature: chat after verifying the phone number. Twitch said the new settings will enable streamers to require some or all users to verify phone numbers before chatting. These new features will also go live on Wednesday.
A blog post from the company said: Containing this type of behavior is and will continue to be our top priority. Chat harassment has a significant impact, including targeted robot attacks.
Creators will be able to add an email verified chat, and they will be able to customize their chat rules according to different standards. For example, the creator can set that only users who have followed within a certain period of time need to be authenticated.
With this feature, users will be able to verify up to 5 accounts with one phone number. According to Twitch’s description of how the feature works, the idea is that the phone-verified chat method will make it more difficult for bad actors to evade channel bans by creating a new account.
Before this announcement, Twitch also took legal actions against at least two accounts it identified, which were behind the attack. At the time, it had not announced the expansion of security features. All of these actions occurred after the increase in harassment activities against creators on the platform.
The aforementioned robot attack refers to a harassment technique called hate raids. Through this technique, malicious actors use the platform’s raid function to flood the creator’s chat history with hate information. Which is usually done using a robot account.
Hate Raid was originally a label to raise awareness of this kind of community behavior and later turned into an organized boycott called ADayOffTwitch, calling on uploaders to strike out on this platform. The ratings have had an impact.
