Twitch hits back at its 'hate raid' trolls with a federal lawsuit

• Twitch sued two of its users for targeting its streamers with hateful and racist speech.
• The company accused the users of conducting "hate raids" against marginalized streamers.
• "Hate raids" are when users use bots to harass streamers by flooding them with hateful comments.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Popular live streaming platform Twitch filed a lawsuit against two of its users this week for targeting Twitch streamers with hateful and racist speech.

The lawsuit targeted two specific users, "Cruzzcontrol" and "CreatineOverdose," who, according to Twitch, are organizing "hate raids" against certain users of the platform.

"Hate raids," a now popular phenomenon on the site, are when anonymous users use bots to harass streamers, typically by flooding the comment section of their live streams with harmful and inappropriate comments. Twitch alleged Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose specifically targeted "streamers from marginalized groups" with "racist, sexist, and homophobic language and content," the lawsuit said.

Despite suspending the users' accounts, the defendants were "undeterred" and "evaded Twitch's bans by creating new, alternate Twitch accounts, and continually altering their self-described 'hate raid code' to avoid detection and suspension by Twitch," the company said in the lawsuit.

According to Twitch's community guidelines and terms of service, users are prohibited from creating, uploading, transmitting, or distributing "any content that is inaccurate, unlawful, infringing, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, harassing, threatening, abusive, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable." Twitch said both Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose violated these terms.

"CruzzControl is responsible for nearly 3,000 bot accounts associated with hate raids," the lawsuit alleged. "Bots developed and deployed by CruzzControl have been linked to various hate raid events, including those targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist, and other harassing content."

Twitch accused CreatineOverdose of similar infractions. Although both users were banned from the platform, Twitch alleged that CreatineOverdose continually returned under new aliases with different usernames to execute the raids and stop Twitch from permanently banning them.

Although the identities of Cruzzcontrol and CreatineOverdose are unknown, Twitch suspects the trolls are from Austria and the Netherlands, according to the lawsuit.

Twitch told Insider in a statement that the company hopes the lawsuit "will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community."

Earlier this year, Twitch changed its user policies to the platform to monitor users offline to watch for deadly, violent, and extreme internet activity. The policy change was intended to be a more thorough, codified version of actions Twitch has taken in the past, Insider reported.

In early September, many Black streamers boycotted the platform and used the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter to urge Twitch to do more to combat hate raids on the site.