Twitch Streamers Organize Strike for Sept 1 to Protest "Hate Raids"

Twitch, the popular online streaming platform, has some community problems. And its gotten bad enough that numerous Twitch streamers have organized a day-long strike in protest of the rampant hate raids on the platform and how little Twitch is working to prevent them.

The chosen protest date will take place on September 1, 2021. During this entire day, Twitch streamers will be halting their broadcasts in protest. The intention behind the movement is to draw focus on the message by negatively impacting overall site viewership (and revenue numbers, in turn) on that day.

For those unfamiliar, a Hate Raid is a more malicious form of a popular Twitch community action called a raid. When one streamer raids another, they direct their entire broadcast viewership over to another streamer. The idea is to promote the growth of other channels by sharing their community.

A hate raid, as you might guess, is when a community or viewership is directed toward another streamer, but with the express intention of harassing them and their community. This method is experienced more often by marginalized streamers, particularly with people of color and those in the LGBT community. The raid often includes hateful messages, violent speech, and automated bot message spamming.

The strike was first arranged by streamer Rek It Raven, and quickly gained the support of other streamers familiar with the issue. Its being organized under the #ADayOffTwitch social media hashtag. It follows a lack of action after Twitch promise to handle these kinds of issues. A transparency report earlier this year revealed that the platform only had a 15% rate of enforcement-per-report. This number was an underwhelming 2% when the report was related to harassment or hateful conduct.

Weve seen this plenty of times before. Places that let hateful behavior thrive become hateful places. Twitch is on a fast track to become one of their places despite the outcries of their content providers.