StopHateBot Helps Twitch Streamers Block ŞĻûŘs

Today, some Twitch streamers are taking a break from the platform to raise awareness about hate raids, when users flood their stream chats with hateful, sometimes racist messages. Their goal is not to drive fans to other platforms, but to force Twitch to pay attention and take action on an issue the company hasn’t solved.

Watching marginalized creators struggle emotionally with hate raids lead streamer and software engineer SmartASCII to the create of StopHateBot, a browser based moderation tool to help Twitch streamers better moderate their chat. 

Hate raids can’t be solved by blocking one or two bad actors. When a streamer's chat is suddenly flooded with abusive messages, colloquially known as a "hate raid," it can often be both overwhelming and technologically difficult to cut down on the hateful spam. Often, perpetrators of hate raids use bots to get around the existing moderation tools, creating so many fake accounts that it's impossible to ban them all. People who are taking today off from streaming have asked that Twitch more transparently address this issue, and be more transparent about when a solution might come.

When marginalized streamers started raising attention to this issue over the summer, SmartASCII told Waypoint that it's been impossible to ignore. Especially because he feels like he can help where Twitch hasn’t. 

"My exposure to the fact that these hate raids existed was kind of exponential," SmartASCII said. "It started as a tweet here or there but quickly became my timeline being full of people facing this, and at that point it was pretty clear that Twitch wasn't ready for this kind of attack."

SmartASCII said that while Twitch does have basic tools that can help the challenges that hate raids pose, they're also lacking in specific ways.

"Twitch has some tools in place that work for the most basic needs," SmartASCII said. "But these attacks are designed to specifically get around all of these."

"Slow mode doesn't work because they're using 50-100 mass-created accounts to each say the message so that they aren't limited," SmartASCII continued. "Hate raiders use extended character sets to get around ban-words. For instance if you add "slur" to your ban list, the bots will use "ŞĻûŘ" in their messages."

None of these are new issues with Twitch's moderation tools. They're simply what makes the hate raid phenomenon possible. SmartASCII said that he built his tool with a mind towards what people who are being affected by hate raids say that they need.

"I designed the filters employed by StopHateBot to target the shown behavior of countless hate-raids that have been spoken about on Social Media; it uses comparative moderation to analyze the similarities between two messages sent in your chat room and acts on them according to the rules and thresholds you set," he said.

Tools like this are certainly a boon for streamers, especially as the issue of hate raids continues to worsen. RekItRaven, a black streamer who helped organize today's Twitch boycott, has said on Twitter that they've been doxed and impersonated following speaking out against hate raids. Still, SmartASCII says that he thinks it will take more than just better tools to combat hate raids. This is a part of Twitch's culture, and it's on Twitch to fix it.

"These people are the product of both the anonymity of the internet as well as festering within communities that either tolerate it at best or encourage it at worst, so it would most certainly need to be targeted from multiple angles," SmartASCII said. "In the end, it's important that Twitch stays on the ball. Obviously no one can know for sure what people will come up with next to harass others, but a fast response with open communication would have gone such a long way with the community."

Twitch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.