According to “Twitch announces new tools to fight hate raids” (2021), Twitch, which is a streaming platform company, takes responsibility for reducing harassments that have been targeting its marginalized streamers by using phone verification tools, banning accounts to stop the abuse, and it has also initiated lawsuits against users who misused the ‘raid’ feature in the platform. Recently, there have been many incidents reported where the ‘raids’ feature, which allows streamers help referring viewers to each other to grow their channels, has been used to target marginalized streamers who are LGBTQ, women and who have colored skins instead of supporting their channels by using programming bots, fake user accounts are created to watch their videos. After their shows end and are offline, the bots send trolling messages to their chat sections with hateful messages. As these kinds of attacks have been increasing, many of the marginalized streamers have demanded the company protect them, and according to the article, they participated in a campaign to boycott the company for one day on 1st September this year. Although the company is going to have users verify themselves through their phone numbers in order to prevent fake users and ban accounts that bully other users, it will be developing new measures to prevent harassment on its streaming platform because it believes that ‘no single tech solution will ever block bad actors' behaviour entirely’.
Reference
Pandey, M. (2021, September 30). Twitch announces new tools to fight hate raids. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-58594732
I had never heard of Twitch until I read Emma's summary and then her chosen source. My first thought was to make a connection with another article that one of my classes is currently reading, which argues based on analyses of Google search data that the sort of racism and other natural human nastiness that Emma's source discusses is indeed alive and well, and not always so hidden as we might wish it.
ReplyDeleteI'm in two minds about racist, sexist, homophobic and other such filth that offend appears on social media platforms. On the one hand, I think free speech is a necessary foundation for any healthy, democratic society, but that seems to require that some truly disgusting, vile, worthless and arguably even harmful speech must be protected. That said, it's the government that may not justly censor what people say on any topic; private businesses such as Twitch, Twitter, Facebook and so on are free to make whatever rules they wish for users to comply with if they want to use their services.
But I don't think I'll get a Twitch account.
I've used twitch before as the viewers, and I think I've seen some negative comments and hate speech to the streamers. I think the article is right that you can't entirely block bad behaviors in the platform. Now, with more policies about hate speech, there are still some negative comments you can see in the social platforms. However, that does not mean that no one has put their consideration into this topic. People nowadays are more aware of the way they posted online and some are trying to prevent these things, including racist sexist and others from happening in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAs I prefer watched videos on YouTube to Twitch, I don't know how the environment of the latter is.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think if this insulting behaviours are stronger and stronger, Twitch should take some actions more seriously.