Why Twitch needs a panic switch
As 'hate raids' proliferate, new tools from Instagram and Twitter suggest a possible solution
One of the best and worst things that can happen to you on a social network is to go viral. Sometimes it works out great, like it did for Carter Wilkerson, who got so many retweets on his post about chicken nuggets when he was 17 that Wendy’s gave him a year’s supply for free. Other times it works out terribly, as it did for players on the England national soccer team who received a torrent of racist abuse and death threats this summer after missing their penalty kicks.
The latter phenomenon — a previously low-profile person who suddenly finds themself thrust into the spotlight, only to be greeted with harassment or worse — occurs naturally on every network. And yet, despite the halting progress that tech platforms have made over the past half-decade or so in addressing abuse, the temporary flood of hatred that these folks sometimes receive has largely gone unaddressed. If you accidentally become today’s main character, in Twitter parlance, your best option until now has typically been to mute the relevant conversation and log off.
I thought about this issue while reading coverage of the protest some Twitch streamers organized today in protest of the company’s failure to prevent “hate raids.” Like shares and retweets before them, “raids” are a Twitch platform mechanic created to amplify good behavior that can also be weaponized to enable abuse. It emerged from the practice of popular streamers essentially donating their live stream viewers to smaller channels at the end of their broadcasts, as a way of promoting up-and-coming talent on the platform.
In recent months, though, some Twitch streamers from marginalized groups complained that their broadcasts were being raided instead by extremists and trolls. Their mission is to disrupt the stream by flooding its accompanying chat with hateful messages, often aided by bots. Here’s Ash Parrish in The Verge:
A Day Off Twitch was born out of the #TwitchDoBetter movement, a hashtag created by streamers affected by the hate raids that have exploded across Twitch in recent weeks. Though the action of bombing a streamer’s chat with racist, sexist, transphobic, and generally abusive messages is not new, the phenomenon has seen a dramatic increase, thanks to users employing bots to overwhelm chats with hundreds of automatically generated messages. In response to what they thought was Twitch’s slow response to the abuse, streamer RekitRaven created the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag to urge the Amazon-owned streaming platform to deploy better tools to stem the tide of harassment.
Twitch has promised that fixes are forthcoming, but in the meantime, streamers are left to contend against the hate raids with community-developed tools and resources. ShineyPen, a Filipino, trans streamer, thought more should be done in addition to talking about the problem, so he decided to organize a walkout. “A Day Off [Twitch] is largely about coming together in solidarity. The one day off is a step in the many steps we have to take towards change.”
To its credit, Twitch has taken numerous steps to prevent hate raids like these from occurring. The practice is explicitly banned in its community standards. Streamers can set it so that only paid subscribers, or people who have followed them for some specified period of time, can participate in chat at all. Twitch also has an “AutoMod” bot that scrubs various slurs from the chat automatically. And the company blocks people from sending the same message over and over again — a common tactic of abuse.
But the hate raiders have proven incredibly determined, a Twitch spokeswoman told me today. When certain slurs were banned, raiders began recreating them using lookalike characters from the Cyrillic or Hebrew alphabets. When Twitch blocked raiders from repeatedly sending identical messages, raiders began adding random extra characters to make the messages appear just different enough to escape detection. And because many of these groups coordinate off platform using communication tools like Discord, Twitch has limited visibility into their organizations or their strategy.
“Hate spam attacks are the result of highly motivated bad actors, and do not have a simple fix, the company said last month amid a surge in hate raids.
Protesting streamers told The Verge that they want Twitch to do more to prevent hate raids from taking place at all, ideally without placing the onus on the streamer to manage the various settings and anti-abuse tools that would make that easier. The entire point of the hate raid is to disrupt the broadcast, and if a sudden influx of trolls forces the streamer to stop and adjust all their settings, they have already lost.
That’s why I’m particularly interested in steps that rival platforms have taken in recent days to protect those who have suddenly gone viral. On Aug. 10, Instagram announced Limits, a one-tap setting that when switched on automatically hides comments and direct message requests from people who don’t follow you (or who only recently followed you.) And today, Twitter announced Safety Mode, which when enabled will automatically prevent suspected bad actors from following you, seeing your tweets, or sending you DMs.
Safety Mode is rolling out to a small group today on Android, iOS and the web. When switched on, it will protect your account in this way for seven days. As with Limits, we need to hear more stories from future main characters about how effectively these tools actually worked in preventing abuse from reaching their eyeballs — Twitch’s experience in recent weeks has shown just how persistent networks’ can be.
At the same time, the approach Instagram and Twitter have taken on this strikes me as directionally correct. When one of your users is panicked, you should offer them a panic button. Limits and Safety Mode are both efforts to create just that.
While they wait for Twitch to act, some embattled users took it upon themselves to build panic buttons for themselves. In another story for The Verge, Parrish explained some of their approaches, starting with a streamer named Bee.
“It’s a multifunction button on my Elgato Stream Deck that disabled the alert box, disables on-stream chat, clears chat, switches to sub-only mode, creates a stream marker, slows chat down, and plays ads,” Bee says. “I also then have a reverse button to undo those actions for when things have calmed down.”
For users who don’t have fancy equipment, Twitch streamer EarthtoBre created a program that does the same thing using Lioranboard — a free stream management tool that works similar to the Stream Deck. She even made a tutorial.
These homegrown solutions are reminiscent of previous efforts from Twitter users to coordinate against harassment when they company was still ignoring them, such as by creating collaborative block lists. Just once, it would be nice if the platforms could get ahead of their own user bases in building the tools necessary to protect them.
In the meantime, I asked Twitch whether it is considering building a one-tap harassment solution of its own. A spokeswoman told me that yes, it is.
The Ratio
Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech companies.
⬆️ Trending up: Amazon said it would remove “ivermectin” from autocomplete suggestions as deeply misinformed people attempt to buy the horse de-worming medication to protect them from COVID-19. But the company has not added any warnings or contextual information to search results for people searching for the drug. (Dieter Bohn / The Verge)
Related: Spotify star Joe Rogan says he took ivermectin, among other things, to treat his COVID-19. But he was also rich enough to afford monoclonal antibodies, and reports feeling fine. (Tim Marchman / Vice)
⬇️ Trending down: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy intervened to keep a top executive at Amazon Web Services after a human resources investigation recommended that he be fired over claims of discrimination. Amazon didn’t deny it but said it had taken the appropriate action.(Joe Williams / Protocol)
Governing
⭐ US antitrust officials are readying a second antitrust lawsuit against Google over its advertising business. But it’s unclear what specific violation is being alleged. Here’s David McLaughlin at Bloomberg:
The Justice Department has accelerated its investigation of Google’s digital advertising practices and may file a lawsuit as soon as the end of the year, said the person, who declined to be named because the investigation is ongoing. No final decisions have been made and the timing could be pushed back.
Related: “Four Democratic members of Congress are calling for an investigation into whether an alleged secret 2018 agreement between Google and Facebook concerning digital advertising violated federal antitrust law.” (Makena Kelly / The Verge)
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are among the companies seeking contracts from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to build systems for its investigative analytics tool, RAVEn. ICE work has been the source of significant worker unrest at these and other companies. (Caroline Haskins / Insider)
The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission said cryptocurrency exchange platforms need to work within the country’s regulatory framework or risk being shut down. “If it’s going to have any relevance five and 10 years from now, it’s going to be within a public policy framework,” Gary Gensler said. (Gary Silverman and Kiran Stacey / Financial Times)
A Swiss study found a correlation between watching Fox News and lower vaccination rates. “By contrast, viewership of either CNN or MSNBC was not found to have a significant effect on vaccination rates compared to the general population.” (Eric Kleefeld / Media Matters)
Government-mandated internet shutdowns are proliferating at an alarming rate, according to advocates for the open web. “Nearly 850 intentional shutdowns have been recorded over the past 10 years by nonprofit Access Now’s Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), and although the group acknowledges that data on incidents before 2016 is “patchy,” some 768 of these shutdowns took place in the last five years.” (James Vincent / The Verge)
Apple asked all its employees to report their COVID vaccination status by mid-September. But it shopped short of a mandate. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)
Arizona and Georgia will become the first states to offer a digital version of their driver’s licenses and state ID cards on Apple’s digital wallet. “Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow." (Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch)
Thousands of posts from the days leading up to and after the January 6 Capitol attack have gone missing from Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool. A deeply unfortunate bug; I’m told it is being fixed and the posts are being restored. (Mark Scott / Politico)
At least 135 Reddit forums have gone private this week in protest of the company’s “teach the controversy” approach to vaccine misinformation. “Subreddits that went private include two with 10 million or more subscribers, namely r/Futurology and r/TIFU.” (Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica)
A state surveillance bill that was rushed through the Australian legislative process gives police broad authority to modify or delete user data if granted a warrant, and also to take over users’ social media accounts. Civil liberties advocates say it represents a severe blow to human rights. (Tutanota)
Industry
⭐ Facebook is getting into the lucrative fantasy sports market. Facebook Fantasy Games is a new part of the Facebook app that offers simplified fantasy sports games, and will also let users bet on outcomes in reality TV shows like Survivor or The Bachelor. Here’s Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:
The first game to launch is Pick & Play Sports, in partnership with Whistle Sports, where fans get points for correctly predicting the winner of a big game, the points scored by a top player or other events that unfold during the match. Players can also earn bonus points for building a streak of correct predictions over several days. This game is arriving today.
In his first interview since becoming Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy said the company plans to hire 55,000 tech and corporate workers around the world in the coming months. That’s roughly the total amount of people employed by Facebook. (Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters)
Twitter launched Super Follows on iOS. Paid access to extra content, starting at $2.99 a month. (Kait Sanchez / The Verge)
Google is reportedly developing its own CPUs for Chromebooks. They’ll be ready around 2023, which is also the year I expect to be able to buy a PlayStation 5. 😩 (Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei)
A look at the customer service issues that could result from Apple being forced to add third-party payments in Korea and elsewhere. Among other things, third-party processors could make it more difficult for people to cancel subscriptions. (John Gruber / Daring Fireball)
Apple plans to add blood pressure monitoring and a thermometer to help with fertility planning in an upcoming version of its watch. The company continues to lean into health as the watch’s killer app. (Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal)
Telegram live streams can now be watched by an unlimited number of viewers. It’s part of an update to the app that includes various other quality-of-life improvements. (Jon Porter / The Verge)
Salman Rushdie will publish his next book in installments on Substack. He said he agreed to do it after Substack reached out to his agent. (Shelley Hepworth / Guardian)
Those good tweets
Talk to me
Send me tips, comments, questions, and love raids: casey@platformer.news.
I wouldn't say the footballers are low profile, they are top sportspeople just like NFL or whatever in the US. There was a massive backlash to the abuse too, quite rightly.
So good to see steady progress in abuse prevention tools. This is becoming a norm, and I’m looking forward to a generation of social networks that start with these patterns baked into the initial design. Also, another fine batch of tweets, well done 👏