Games and Online Harassment Hotline publishes toolkit on how to stay safe from a hate raid
The Games and Online Harassment Hotline has published a guide on how to stay safe from a hate raid. Raids are a Twitch feature intended to provide opportunities for collaboration by sending viewers to another stream. However, raids have also come to be used as a systematic tool to silence and intimidate streamers by flooding a channel with racist, sexist or queerphobic content, primarily targeting Black, women, queer, and other marginalised streamers.
The guide published by the Games and Online Harassment Hotline provides guidance and steps for victims of hate raids to prevent such attacks and to protect themselves, including:
- How to set up your stream and settings to minimise the impact of a hate raid;
- What to do during a hate raid;
- And further safety steps to take after a hate raid.
It also provides recommendations on how to prepare for hate raids, including how to create a safe scene, reviewing settings on Twitch, setting up chatbots to lock down a chat with a single command, and how to loop in moderators or prevent a hate raid spilling over to your discord server.
It is hoped that empowering streamers who may be victims of hate raids with tips on how to protect themselves will enable them to develop a sense of agency and be empowered to react to hate raids and online harassment.
The guide on “How to stay safe from a hate raid” can be accessed here.
Please note: The information contained in this note is for general guidance on matters of interest, and does not constitute legal advice. For any enquiries, please contact us at [email protected].