Twitch vows to tackle online abuse after 'hate raids' on platform

The company has responded after the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter was trending

Twitch has vowed to do better after a series of 'hate raids' on the gaming site's chatrooms. Getty Images

Twitch, the world’s leading live-streaming gaming platform, has vowed to tackle online hatred across its network.

In response to multiple complaints about the harassment of women and people of colour, it has outlined a strategy for removing hate speech across its chat rooms.

In a series of tweets, the company said it was aware that users faced abuse generated by automated bots, called ‘botting’ and ‘hate raids’, that involve swamping comment boards with negative comments. The complaints referred to the use of derogatory racist and sexist language.

“We’ve seen a lot of conversation about botting, hate raids, and other forms of harassment targeting marginalised creators,” Twitch said on Twitter.

To flag the complaints, Twitch users adopted the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter. In reply, the company confirmed: “we know we need to do more to address these issues”, acknowledging that users are asking for it to do better.

It went on to thank users for drawing the matter to its attention.

“We were able to identify a vulnerability in our proactive filters, and have rolled out an update to close this gap and better detect hate speech in chat. We'll keep updating this to address emerging issues.”

In a bid to remove offensive language, Twitch will roll out what it refers to as “channel-level ban evasion detection and account verification” later in the year. The aim is that the new programs will detect and remove hate speech.

“We’re working hard to launch these tools as soon as possible,” Twitch said. It added it hoped that it would have a “big impact” on the user experience.