The US streaming portal Twitch has sued two users from Austria and the Netherlands for racist and homophobic hate campaigns against streamers. According to the complaint filed in a civil court in San Francisco, the platform is demanding an indefinite amount of damages from the two users. The targets of the hate attacks by the two users were therefore often members of ethnic minorities or the LGBTQ community.
Instead of the real names of the sued users, Twitch only mentioned their account names in the court documents. Behind the “CruzzControl” account is a user based in the Netherlands, “CreatineOverdose” is said to live in Vienna. Twitch still had to find out the correct names and wanted to submit them later.
The two are said to have coordinated their hate attacks since August. According to Twitch, they flooded the chat history of the attacked users with “racist, sexist and homophobic language” via bot-controlled accounts. Bots are programs that can send messages or other content quickly and automatically.
According to Twitch, they sent dozens of hate messages per minute, which made it impossible to moderate the attacked chats. According to the complaint, Twitch had blocked the original accounts of the sued users – but they created new accounts under which they continued their attacks. The two therefore belong to a whole network of users who spread hatred on the streaming service.
Twitch, which belongs to the US digital giant Amazon, became big as a platform for streaming computer games and is also widespread in Europe, especially among young men. The streamers film themselves while playing and can interact with other users. Because of the increasing hate campaigns, numerous users boycotted the platform in protest last week.
Female, non-white and LGBTQ gamers in particular have been complaining for months that the platform fails to stop the hate speech while retaining half of the streamers’ income. Twitch stated that it is working to improve programs to protect users from abuse.