Twitch Tries to Sue Artifact Troll Streamers

Alrighty, so, you might recall that just before E3, Twitch “raided” the Artifact category, as the long-ignored but presumed popular game was being used as a thin cover to shelter pornographic, hateful, and sometimes outright violent streams. Twitch shut down many of those ‘troll streams’ and we kind of assumed that would be the end of it, but as it turns out, Twitch is pissed off about this infringement, and has gone forward with trying to sue the trolls who flooded the site with boobs and blood.

On June 14, they filed a lawsuit in a U.S District Court in Northern California: Twitch vs “John and Jane Does 1 through 100”:

And it says the following:

Twitch took down the posts and banned the offending accounts, but the offensive video streams quickly reappeared using new accounts. It appears that Defendants use automated methods to create accounts and disseminate offensive material as well as to thwart Twitch’s safety mechanisms. Such methods are often referred to as “bots.” Defendants also use bots to artificially increase the popularity of the streams broadcasting the offensive conduct, making those streams more easily discoverable by users browsing Twitch.

To protect the Twitch community, Twitch took the extremely disruptive step of disabling streaming for all newly created accounts for almost two days before imposing two-factor authentication for certain accounts. In response, Defendants sought to evade these steps using old accounts as well as accounts purchased from other users.

This is a strong move on paper that becomes less strong when you realize Twitch doesn’t really have a reliable way to identify who the troll streamers were. It’s possible one or two could be snagged if they’re really stupid and either bragged about their stream or revealed their identities mid-stream, but functionally, most of these people probably got off the hook scot-free.

Which is a shame, if you were to ask me. Some of those streams were genuinely vile.