Boycotting Twitch's "Hate Raids"
Self-portrait of video game streamer RekItRaven in Virginia. [RekItRaven/AFP]
On Sept. 1, the streaming website Twitch took a tumble. The site saw its smallest viewership in a month, garnering about 400,000 viewers and 27,000 streamers less than in the previous week. The cause? A platform-wide boycott led by marginalized creators demanding that Twitch fight harassment.
Twitch has largely been used by gamers in the past – prominent players would livestream themselves playing popular video games like Fortnite and Minecraft, broadcasting their screen to their followers and narrating their actions. Followers can chat in a text box under the stream. Streamers often project those chat boxes onto the livestream and react to them. After a streamer ends their live stream, they can send all their viewers to another streamer’s channel, a move that’s called a “raid.” Raids can be positive – a gesture of support to another streamer – but for Black and queer streamers, the “raid” feature has become a tool of harassment.
The protest, #ADayOffTwitch, was organized by RekItRaven, a horror gamer who also discusses social justice issues on her Twitch stream, after Raven and fellow streamers Lucia Everblack and ShineyPen noticed a significant uptick in “hate raids” on the platform. During hate raids, streamers’ chats are bombarded with messages and usernames of new followers, containing racist, homophobic, sexist and otherwise hateful language.
Raven previously started the #TwitchDoBetter campaign to encourage the platform to design tools against harassment. Earlier this month, AJ+ producer Iliana Hagenah spoke with Raven about her experience as a Black, gay streamer on Twitch, and how the platform is responding to racism and transphobia, and other forms of hate speech.
“This movement is bigger than just Twitch, because in society Black and brown people are still not treated equal,” Raven said. “It's important to understand that even though you may feel like your voice doesn't matter, if you speak up and other people speak up with you … you do have the power to change things.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me about the movement leading up to #ADayOffTwitch?
#TwitchDoBetter was really just about me being fed up. I was fed up with seeing myself and others be targeted for things not in our control. Nobody wakes up and is like, “Hey, I want to be Black or brown or trans today, and I really want society to hate me for it, so can I please just be a little bit more oppressed today.”
And after I [posted] a couple of clips of my own chat being [hate] raided, others started amplifying that. There were a lot of people who were experiencing it at that time. So I think it happened at the right time, where people could get on board and say, “Hey, this is happening to me too. And it shouldn't be.”
How did #ADayOffTwitch begin?
It began after the #TwitchDoBetter movement really took off. I had ShineyPen and Lucia Everblack messaging me like, “What's the next step? We should probably do a boycott.” At first, I was a little skeptical, but I think it was a good idea … We decided to use my platform because it was gaining momentum. And we decided on the tag #ADayOffTwitch to really send a message … because we've been here before. Hate raids are not new, they've been happening for years. [Twitch was founded a decade ago.] It's only the [volume] that is new. We were in the middle of planning when people were starting to get doxxed, so rushed to settle on September 1.
How have hate raids increased over time?
I started on the platform in late 2015, and we were [told], “Yes, people are going to come in and say things, but just ignore them and ban them and you'll be fine.” It was one or two people, you'd ban them, and that was the end of it.
It was a very slow escalation. Hate raids would happen, people would code bots [with] these messages and at the press of a button, they would literally fill somebody's chat with this hate. But it wasn't often. In the last three, four months, we've seen an escalation.
What are the kinds of things that they say?
I've experienced them having threats against my children, against myself. They have told me to hang myself. They told me that they were going to twist my n*gg*r head off. They told me that Black people don't deserve to live. Basically they called me a “gigger” because I am Black and I dress in gothic attire … And it is very similar for so many people where multiple facets of their identity are just being attacked.
How do you deal with this on a personal level?
Sometimes it's hard, right? Unfortunately, we are almost conditioned to have a thick skin. At first it really started to bother me, but the more I saw it, the more desensitized I became to it. Obviously when my children were involved I was angry, because you can hate me all you want, but my children have never done anything to anybody. I'm at the point of not allowing them the satisfaction of seeing that they have affected me in any way outside of a positive way, ‘cause as much as they may hate me, they are the reason why I have the platform I have right now.
Is Twitch doing enough to combat this issue?
I think they're trying. I think unfortunately there has been a lot of very gross oversight, and that's why we're here. They just put in multiple authentication factors that creators can tailor to their needs, and that's great, ‘cause that's something that we were asking for.
The fact that they are actually looking to sue some of the people that are involved is a win for us, because it's peeling back the curtains. There are so many different things that need to be addressed, so I will take little bits and pieces if it means that they're going to keep moving and keep progressing. But I'm also not afraid to hold them accountable.
What do you think led to the Twitch lawsuit? Do you think your movement had anything to do with it?
Oh, I absolutely do. It definitely took a community to be able to get to the point of having these changes.
We are not going to get rid of hate. That's not something that I will ever see in my lifetime. But I can combat it, and we can all do better. I don't think hate raids are going to go away, but I think that you can make them harder.
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