Interactive gaming and live-streaming service Twitch has made a statement after fostering some negative attention for its "hate raids," where bots flood the chats of live-streamers with racial slurs and hateful language.
The raids often targeted the platform's minority-population and marginalized users. Twitch initially received criticism for its alleged lack of decision and action, but a Twitch spokesperson told Northern California Record that the platform has filed a complaint in federal court against the individuals involved in the attacks.
"The malicious actors involved have been highly motivated in breaking our terms of service, creating new waves of fake bot accounts designed to harass creators even as we continually update our site-wide protections against their rapidly evolving behaviors," the spokesperson said.
Twitch has reportedly banned thousands of accounts in recent weeks in its effort to squash the attacks, but the individuals behind them "continue to work hard on creative ways to circumvent [Twitch's] improvements, and show no intention of stopping."
Two Twitch users were banned from the platform for their involvement in the attacks and were also named in the complaint, but they have allegedly since found ways to create new accounts and continue their hate raids through slight alterations of coding.
According to Shack News, the two users, “Cruzzcontrol” and “CreatineOverdose," are likely based out of the Netherlands and Austria.
Twitch users staged a protest against the platform to pressure it into taking action against the raids, resulting in some of Twitch's lowest viewership numbers all year.
"We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community," the Twitch statement continued.
Twitch said that the federal complaint is "by no means" the only action taken to address the targeted attacks, nor is it the last.
"Our teams have been working around the clock to update our proactive detection systems, address new behaviors as they emerge, and finalize new proactive, channel-level safety tools that we’ve been developing for months," the spokesperson said. "Hate and harassment have no place on Twitch, and we know we have a lot more work to do – but we hope that these combined actions will help reduce the immediate and unacceptable harm that targeted attacks have been inflicting on our community."