Twitch booted over 15m hate raid bots in 2021

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Streaming platform Twitch claims to have kicked off more than 15 million bots from its service.

That's according to a blog post from the firm's VP of global trust and safety, Angela Hession, who reiterated the fact that "hate raids" were not to be tolerated on the platform. To this end, Twitch has clamped down on bot attacks that flood a user's chat with hateful spam, with over 15 million of these being removed during 2021.

"Our work in this space is not over," Hession wrote.

"We’re continuing to work on sitewide proactive detection updates, as well as pursuing legal action against individuals who carried out many of the attacks. Your feedback around these raids has been an important factor in how we decide what to do next, so as always, keep it coming."

Bad actors on Twitch are nothing new, but last year things came to a head when a number of streamers started the #ADayOffTwitch event in protest of the company's lack of action when it came to these instances. This resulted in a 21 per cent drop in traffic. Twitch has also filed a lawsuit against two users for using bots to harass people on the service and has rolled out new features to curb bad actors.