In a recent Twitter post, Streamlabs announced a new mode that will help protect streamers from hate raids as they introduce the ‘Safe Mode’.
Harassment on Twitch or other streaming services is sadly, nothing new, and yet these creators are now finding themselves frequently targeted with a new kind of attack called a “hate raid”.
A hate raid occurs when a streamer is live and they receive an influx of bots following them and then spamming the same message in their chat box — usually something racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise toxic. Because of this, some streamers including RekItRaven have started drawing attention to the issue of hate raiding when it happened to them in July. RekItRaven posted a video of themselves getting raided, starting the hashtag called #TwitchDoBetter.
Now, in light of Twitch’s silence on hate raids and other harassment against streamers, streaming software creator Streamlabs announced its own measures to protect content creators. Via twitter post, they introduce the ‘Safe Mode’ in which a setting that will adjust a streamer’s chat and clear any queued alerts in order to prevent a streamer from being spammed with fake followers and receiving hateful messages in chat. This new mode is now available for all Streamlabs users and works with Cloudbot, Streamlabs’ Twitch chat bot.
Safe Mode is available within the Streamlabs client and can be activated while a streamer is live. Upon activation, Safe Mode will disable follower alerts, clear all recent events, and clear any queued follower, host, or raid alerts. If the streamer also has Cloudbot enabled, Safe Mode will restrict chat to emote only and either follower-only or sub-only mode, preventing hate raiders from filling chat with harassing messages.
