Twitch’s vice president of global trust and safety, Angela Hession, has written an open letter detailing the company’s efforts to make its streaming platform a more peaceful place, including the removal of millions of bots in an effort to combat the site’s hate raid epidemic.
Leaving aside the absurdity of equating opposition to military recruitment with ongoing harassment of Black and queer people, Hession goes on to describe some of the steps Twitch has taken to achieve these goals. The most significant is the removal of over 15 million bots that were used to spread toxic messages in stream chat and the filing of lawsuits against those responsible for hate raids. Despite implementing phone number-verified chat privileges and new tools for detecting suspicious users, Twitch expects that number to rise.
Twitch’s commitment to enforcing the site’s off-service misconduct policy, which was introduced last April, is also reaffirmed in Hession’s letter. If used correctly, this should keep people who commit the most heinous crimes (death threats, child exploitation, etc.) off Twitch, as well as protect users from having their abuse followed to and from other social media platforms.
Improvements to the user reporting and appeals process, as well as updates to how streamers can use suspicious user information, are all planned for 2022.