Twitch Streamer Creates Third-Party 'Panic Button' to Counter Hate Raids

As Twitch remains "constantly working" on solutions to protect marginalized streamers from hate raids, a content creator has devised a community resource to hopefully help out others encountering the issue on the platform.

Australian content creator nutty (@nuttylmao) is quite versed in the technical side of streaming to say the least, having a plethora of YouTube videos that go over everything from OBS plugins to Stream Deck tips and tricks.

Ahead of Wednesday's #ADayOffTwitch broadcast boycott, which was spearheaded by the efforts of smaller creators to spark change and inspire solidarity, nutty tweeted that they were going to do "something productive" on their time off. The result was revealed one day later.

On stream, which has a VOD accessible to all, nutty unveiled and showed viewers how to create their own "panic button" in Streamer.bot to help stop hate raids.

With the third-party resource, channels that are being spammed with hateful messages, particularly in their chat, will be able to put the situation on lockdown. Particularly with nutty's own setup, this is initiated at the sound of one voice command—"Eliminate the haters."

Essentially, the macro command turns on sub-only mode, clears the chat, refreshes any on-screen overlays of the chat, and posts a warning message.

Additionally, for some fun additions to help bring some positivity to such an event, nutty's command changes his background lights from casual purples and blues to a high-alert white, and eventually disengages with, "Haters successfully eliminated. Type Pepegod in chat to celebrate."

"Everyone's making like a macro on a Stream Deck to like shut down their chat," nutty said on stream. "This is my way of shutting down my chat.

"I basically wanted to demo this because I did this entirely for free. I know a lot of people don't have a Stream Deck."

While the work of nutty and those in the community hoping to help address the issue is surely deserving of applause, the hate raid issue remains something that Twitch needs to take action on from their side, as shown by others.

As demonstrated by photographer and Twitch affiliate, Art for the Apocalypse (@thomsimonson), Twitch's long established channel moderation tools (e.g. Channel-Banned Terms Filter and AutoMod) simply aren't enough to protect streamers from bots.

"By weaponizing the chat," Art for the Apocalypse tweeted," harassers are simultaneously abusing people and inhibiting communication. Twitch has to get out ahead of it because individual streamers will never have the resources."

Meanwhile, concerns over the limitations of the current raid and follower settings, as well as IP grabbens, remain issues on other fronts as well.