Twitch announced Wednesday that it is rolling out phone-verified chats, a new safety feature designed to help get harassment, malicious users and “hate raids” under control.
The news comes amid scrutiny over how the platform handles the safety of its Black and LGBTQ users. Hate raids, which is when a user or bots infiltrate a chat with harassment, have made streaming on the platform untenable for many users who belong to marginalized groups.
Phone-verified chats will allow targeted creators to have more control over who can participate in their community, Twitch said in a blogpost on Wednesday.
The move will require all or some users to verify phone number before participating in a streamer’s chat, which could potentially help to reduce targeted attacks by bots. Once a user verifies the phone number to their account, they will not need to verify it again for another channel.
Twitch said it began working on the tool five months ago, before the recent spotlight on targeted “hate raids,” and the platform is optimistic that the new tool could reduce harassment and bot attacks.
Twitch’s Vice President of Trust & Safety Angela Hession said that the new tool was not designed exclusively in response to hate raids, and is “intended to help stop chat-based harassment of all kinds.”
“Hate and harassment of any kind is unacceptable on Twitch, and we know we have further to go in building the safe, inclusive community we intend,” Hession told NBC News in an email statement.
Hession called the ongoing malicious bot attacks frustrating, adding that Twitch is still working to make the platform a safer and friendlier place for all its users.
In an effort to reduce harassment and other concerns on the platform, Twitch has doubled its safety operations team in the last year and quadrupled its number of moderators, Hession said. She added that the increase in moderators increased the team’s response time to users by 96 percent.
“Creators have different needs, and we’ve learned that we can best create a safe, diverse environment at scale when we empower creators to set their own guidelines on top of our own,” she said.
Twitch said that users will be able to customize who must verify or have verified their phone, email or both. The verification can be applied to an age group or time frame, such as how long ago an account was made, according to the release.
The move is also intended to prevent users from being able to evade a ban by simply creating a new account as all accounts associated with a phone number will be banned if one account is banned. Twitch allows one phone number to have up to five accounts associated with it.
Although live user attacks are a problem on Twitch, bot attacks are a ferocious problem on the platform without a simple solution. Twitch said it is still working to fight the issue from several angles.
“We’ve banned millions of malicious follow attempts and removed thousands of malicious bot accounts, but these actors have been relentless and their attacks don’t have a quick fix,” Hession said.
Earlier this month, Twitch filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against two of its users for repeatedly flouting its community guidelines against harassment, including committing bot attacks.
Cruzzcontrol, a streamer believed to be based in Baarto, Netherlands, and Creatineoverdose, a streamer believed to be based in Vienna, Austria, are accused by Twitch of engaging in “hate raids,” creating new accounts to continue harassing minority Twitch users after the platform banned them, and using bots to overwhelm creators with sexist, racist, and homophobic language and content, according to the court documents.
The two streamers are currently only know by their user names.
Thousands of bots have been linked to Cruzzcontrol, “including those targeting black and LGBTQIA streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content,” according to the complaint. Creatineoverdose also used bot software to infiltrate marginalized users with harassment.
Ahead of the suit, marginalized creators held a boycott of Twitch, which they called “A Day Off Twitch” to raise attention for how rampant “hate raids” had become A Twitch spokesperson said in a statement at the time that the platform was “working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators.”
Hession was reluctant to share details of what Twitch is planning next for the platform’s safety, saying that information about what the site is working on could tip bad actors off and give them a head-start on circumventing those tools.
“I know it’s frustrating when we can’t share details about our safety pipeline, especially when community members are hurting—but we are always working on improvements and actively incorporating community feedback into the work we do,” she said. “And there is more to come.”
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