Twitch Actively Reviewing, Suspending and Exploring Taking Legal Action Against March Hate Raiders

In the latest chapter in Twitch's battle to protect marginalized streamers from hate raids, the platform put out a statement Friday announcing they are "actively reviewing reports," "suspending" and "investigating" taking legal action towards those who participated last week.

Hate raids have notoriously long been a major issue on the platform, as highlighted last September with the #ADayOffTwitch broadcast boycott spearheaded by the efforts of smaller creators to spark change and inspire solidarity.

As first reported by Dot Esports on March 11, however, the latest wave of "bad actors" plaguing the social channels of women and LGBTQ+ Twitch streamers with hateful, homophobic messages seemingly was the result of plans coordinated on a different website entirely — a streaming platform recently co-founded by American far-right and white nationalist political commentator Nick Fuentes called Cozy.tv.

"Over the past 24 hours," Twitch posted on Twitter, "bad actors have been coordinating off-Twitch to target women and LGBTQ+ members of our community with spammy and hateful chat messages. Hate has no place on Twitch, and we’ve identified and suspended the Twitch accounts of the individuals participating.

"Our Safety team is actively reviewing reports and suspending users in violation of our TOS. Our legal team is also involved and actively investigating. We've taken legal action against those who've harassed our community in the past and continue to take these activities seriously."

According to Dot Esports, Twitch streamer EarthToBre and Twitter user xProvexx were among the first to report that the hate raids were stemming from Cozy.tv, and that Fuentes has gone on to claim credit for the attacks in a video.

Fuentes has not only long been banned on Twitch, but from most other popular social media platforms as well, including Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and DLive, a site known for hosting alt-right and conspiracy theorists (H/T PC Gamer).

Twitch went on to mention in their statement some "big impact" settings that streamers can enable in order to perhaps prevent hate raids, from dialing up AutoMod to L3 and turning on Followers-Only and Slow Mode, to enabling email and phone verification and only allowing Raids from friends.

As seen in the past, however, with content creators taking it upon themselves to help out others encountering the issue on the platform, a long-term solution from Twitch that doesn't hinder engagement and analytics remains highly desired.