Following reports earlier this week, Twitch has officially unveiled a new suite of verification-based tools intended to help combat the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of hate raiding.
Twitch’s controversial raid feature was originally designed to be an easy way for streamers to share audiences by enabling them to redirect all viewers currently watching their broadcast to a target channel. Unfortunately, malicious users quickly began exploiting the feature, setting up dummy accounts and bots to flood the chats of often marginalised streamers and subject them to doxing, harassment, and attack.
Following a successful 24-hour strike by streamers last month in protest of Twitch’s perceived lack of action in tackling the issue, the company said it was “working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators.” And now, the first fruits of those labours have been officially unveiled.
As previously reported, these new tools are focussed around phone and email verification, giving streamers more control over their channels by letting them specify exactly who gets chat privileges. “Phone verified chat gives Creators finer control over who can participate in chat, by allowing them to require some or all users to verify a phone number before chatting,” explains Twitch. “Together with updated, more granular email verification settings, Creators will now be able to use email and phone verification in tandem to meet their specific needs.”