Hate Raids on Twitch: Understanding Real-Time Human-Bot Coordinated Attacks in Live Streaming Communities

Abstract

Online harassment and content moderation have been well-documented in online communities. However, new contexts and systems always bring new ways of harassment and need new moderation mechanisms. This study focuses on hate raids, a form of group attack in real-time in live streaming communities. Through a qualitative analysis of hate raids discussion in the Twitch subreddit (r/Twitch), we found that (1) hate raids as a human-bot coordinated group attack leverages the live stream system to attack marginalized streamers and other potential groups with(out) breaking the rules, (2) marginalized streamers suffer compound harms with insufficient support from the platform, (3) moderation strategies are overwhelmingly technical, but streamers still struggle to balance moderation and participation considering their marginalization status and needs. We use affordances as a lens to explain how hate raids happens in live streaming systems and propose moderation-by-design as a lens when developing new features or systems to mitigate the potential abuse of such designs.