A Day Off Twitch: Here is why streamers are protesting

Dimapur, September 1 (EMN): Twitch streamers are boycotting the platform for a day to protest against the 'hate raids' on Twitch streams that have sadly become a huge nuisance plaguing the platform.

The September 1 "A Day Off Twitch" protest has been spearheaded by streamers such as RekitRaven, ShineyPen and Lucia Everblack who wants to send a message to Twitch about the severity of the problem.

Hate raids are a disgusting phenomenon whereby it involves a huge number of bot accounts flooding a streamer's chat with sexist, racist, transphobic and other forms of harassing messages. Particularly targeted at streamers from the LGBTQ+ community, hate raids have been a recurring problem on the platform that has gone out of control.

Lately, Twitch streamers have been experiencing an influx of hate messages, often generated by bots, and the problem has gotten so bad that streamers would be left with no choice but to cut off streams in order to get away from the toxicity.

Last month, Twitch took to Twitter to inform the community that the company was against hate raids and that it was "working hard to make Twitch a safer place for creators."

No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for. This is not the community we want on Twitch, and we want you to know we are working hard to make Twitch a safer place for creators. https://t.co/fDbw62e5LW

— Twitch (@Twitch) August 20, 2021

Despite Twitch's promise to combat online abuse on its platform, creators still felt unsafe and needed affirmative action from the platform to mitigate the issue. Creators have argued that Twitch has not made any tangible action to ensure the platform was safe especially for creators from marginalised communities.

Many streamers joined the #ADayOffTwitch movement after RekitRaven first kicked off the protest on his Twitter page. The tweet went viral and before long, many streamers have expressed solidarity with the message.