Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform Governance
Open accessAbstract
In the summer of 2021, users on the livestreaming platform Twitch were targeted by a wave of "hate raids," a form of attack that overwhelms a streamer's chatroom with hateful messages, often through the use of bots and automation. Using a mixed-methods approach, we combine a quantitative measurement of attacks across the platform with interviews of streamers and third-party bot developers. We present evidence that confirms that some hate raids were highly-targeted, hate-driven attacks, but we also observe another mode of hate raid similar to networked harassment and specific forms of subcultural trolling. We show that the streamers who self-identify as LGBTQ+ and/or Black were disproportionately targeted and that hate raid messages were most commonly rooted in anti-Black racism and antisemitism. We also document how these attacks elicited rapid community responses in both bolstering reactive moderation and developing proactive mitigations for future attacks. We conclude by discussing how platforms can better prepare for attacks and protect at-risk communities while considering the division of labor between community moderators, tool-builders, and platforms.
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Livestreaming platforms like Twitch feature a third-party market for content moderation tools to help streamers manage chatting audiences, even as such tools risk redundancy from Twitch's in-house offerings.
“Similarly, livestreaming platforms like Twitch feature a third-party market for content moderation tools to help streamers manage their chatting audiences (Han et al., 2023), even as such tools risk redundancy from Twitch's in-house offerings (Partin, 2020).”
From Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance (2025) · cites this paper as Han et al., 2023
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Investigando a Dinâmica da Propagação do Ódio em Cascatas de Toxicidade nos Chats Ao Vivo da Twitch
Lobo, J. V. C., Barbosa, D. M., & Melo, P. D. F. (2025) · Proceedings of the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia 2025) · doi:10.5753/webmedia.2025.15110 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
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“Similarly, livestreaming platforms like Twitch feature a third-party market for content moderation tools to help streamers manage their chatting audiences (Han et al., 2023), even as such tools risk redundancy from Twitch’s in-house offerings (Partin, 2020).”
- Authors
- Han, C., Seering, J., Kumar, D., Hancock, J. T., & Durumeric, Z.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Published
- 2023-04-14
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- CSCW1
- Pages
- 1-28
- ISSN
- 2573-0142 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4366004207
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 2
- FWCI
- 4.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Computing Research Association (2127309,2030859)
- National Science Foundation (DGE-1656518)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Keywords
- Twitch, live streaming, online harassment, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, platform governance, community moderation, targeted attacks, division of labor
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