A group of streamers on the live-streaming platform Twitch, popular with video gaming enthusiasts, have announced a campaign to demand Twitch tackle a flood of Nazi symbols and other hateful messages and imagery that have been flooding the platform's chats in recent months.
After users complained that Twitch’s response to the matter earlier in the month amounted to little more than a notice they were working on the issue, a group of high profile Twitch streamers put their popular influence behind a #ADayOffTwitch in response, a one-day “walkout” from the platform to shed light on the situation so that Twitch will make serious changes, reported Shack News.
The protest is set for September 1.
The #ADayOffTwitch has begun to catch on with the social media site’s legion of streamers, who plan to use their collective power to convince Twitch to act on the flood of hateful imagery in chat sessions from specific accounts, termed “hate raids.”
Streamers are asked to participate by not using the site that day.
The #ADayOffTwitch campaign is billing itself as “Change starts with us” and using the slogan “Join the movement.”
While the protest may not end hate raids, it aims to convince Twitch to improve and increase regulation of hateful content.
Twitch is one of the world’s largest video game streaming platforms.
In April, Twitch became the first social media site to enact a policy banning users for offences, such as promoting hate or violence, that occur outside of the service.
Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, said that its new regulations mean that offline offences that pose a “substantial safety risk” to its “community” would result in a ban, reported Reuters.
In August, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released the “2021 Online Antisemitism Report Card” looking into nine social media platforms – Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Roblox, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube – to see how they dealt with submitted reports of anti-Semitic content.
The ADL gave Twitch a C, stating that the platform did have a “hate policy that explicitly mentions race, religion and ethnicity” and that it responded to complaints of hate within a 24 to 72 hour period. However, it noted that Twitch did not have a trusted flagger program or a “notification of policy reason for enforcement” and that it did not have “effective product-level efforts to address anti-Semitism.”