The revenge of ‘tribal’ toxic masculinity: hate raids on Twitch

Abstract

Toxic geek masculinity is common in gaming spaces, with racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and ableism running rampant on live streaming platforms like Twitch. In particular, Twitch has made choices to encode certain features that have empowered the proliferation of toxic behavior, such as attacks by users on users that are intended to harass, abuse, and disrupt, called ‘hate raids’. In 2017, Twitch released a ‘raiding’ feature on their platform, encoding a community practice taken from military tactics that they then marketed as a way of building community through audience sharing. The authors examine how this decision enabled the weaponization of the feature against streamers of historically marginalized identities, amplifying existing toxic geek masculinity. They argue that hate raids are emblematic of increasingly common toxic and abusive online behavior targeting users of marginalized identities, and illustrate how contemporary digital media platforms are not designed with safety or care for many of their users in mind. The authors illustrate that uncritical implementation of platform features, without attention to their affiliated histories and cultural practices, contribute to reinscribing the intertwined matrices of discrimination and control, and further empower toxic geek masculinity.