Twitch Sues 2 Users for Repeatedly Flooding Chats with Racist, Homophobic Language

Twitch has filed a legal complaint against two users for flooding the chats of Black, queer and disabled streamers with racist, sexist and homophobic language–a phenomenon on the streaming site better known as “hate raids.”

The Washington Post reports that the two users, referred to in the suit by their handles “CruzzControl” and “CreatineOverdose,” are accused of repeatedly evading bans on Twitch by creating new accounts and “seriously harmed and will continue to harm the Twitch community.”

This lawsuit, filed Thursday, comes after marginalized streamers participated in a one-day boycott of the platform to draw attention to the rampant issue of hate raids and to push Twitch to take more action against those behind them.

From the Post:

According to the complaint, CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, whose real names remain unknown, are based in the Netherlands and Austria respectively. The suit alleges that CruzzControl has explicitly admitted to using bots for the purpose of hate raids. It also says that on Aug. 15, CreatineOverdose allegedly “used their bot software to demonstrate how it could be used to spam Twitch channels with racial slurs, graphic descriptions of violence against minorities, and claims that the hate raiders are the ‘K K K.’”

Twitch claims in the suit that CreatineOverdose and CruzzControl continue to operate on Twitch under a variety of aliases and avoid detection by “continually altering their self-described ‘hate raid code.’”

The streaming platform provided a statement to the Post that said, in part, that this complaint is only one step of its long-term plan to address hate raids.

Organizers of the one-day boycott previously said that they took a day away from streaming on Twitch not because they wanted to impact the site’s finances, but more because they wanted to see more tangible action against hate raiders.

Here’s more from Twitch’s statement on the lawsuit it provided to the Post:

“Hate and harassment have no place on Twitch, and we know we have a lot more work to do — but we hope that these combined actions will help reduce the immediate and unacceptable harm that targeted attacks have been inflicting on our community.”