Random Roar: It’s Everyone’s Problem Now

 

Botting has been a problem on Twitch for a while now, but up until recently, it had mainly hit specific kinds of Twitch streamers.  Unfortunately, this made it very easy for everyone else, especially specific groups of people (read: white and male, mainly) to declare it to be not their problem.  As long as they didn’t see it, it was not an issue.  It also seemed to specifically target LGBT and people of colour.

Up until recently, the bots seemed to leave the smallest channels alone, but over the weekend, several roving bands of bots hit basically every channel, whether or not they were the type of streamer who usually got hit by such attacks.  Case in point: we’ve largely been able to avoid the hate raids and follow bots in the past, but during our Super Adventure Island II and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army streams this past weekend, we got hit several times by a soulless army of our own.

We’re not big Twitch streamers, we usually remain in the single digits for viewer counts, and we typically only stream on the weekends.  We’re not trying to make a living on Twitch or YouTube, we each have day jobs that pay the bills.  So when even channels like ours are getting hit with bots, there’s definitely something wrong.

The latest crop of bots follow and unfollow pretty much instantly and will do so in waves, but as of yet, there’s no real consensus why they’re doing this.  It’s not inflating anyone’s viewer or follower count and most Twitch streamers who had to learn how to deal with hate raids are dealing with these new nuisance bots fairly easily.

I’ve seen theories that the bots are trying to harvest personal information for unknown reasons, but on the surface, the user information being leaked doesn’t appear to be anything that would help the owners of the bot specifically steal anyone’s identity, so the motivations of such information theft remain a mystery for now.  I’ve also heard it suggested that the ramping up of botting like this is meant more to increase the visibility of the problem and maybe try to prove to Twitch that they need to do something about it, since the bots are there and gone in an instant and aren’t actively harassing users this time around.

Another possibility is that this might be an attempt at revenge from the hate raiders being sued by Twitch, but it seems odd that users with a history of harassment against minorities would choose such a benign method of revenge, especially when one of the users being sued was bragging about being able to create a lot of bots in a short period of time in response to the list of banned bots being shared among streamers.  If he can create as many bots as he says he can, why would his revenge involve something as mostly harmless as this, considering his past behaviour?

According to this Reddit thread, there’s a possibility these new bots are harvesting IP addresses in order to hit streamers or their followers with DDOS attacks, effectively targeting them for removal from the Internet and frustrating them in the process.  As far as I can tell, this new kind of attack isn’t as widespread or as highly publicized as the hate raid was, so we might have to take this information with a grain of salt.

It’s been almost a month since A Day Off Twitch, and the platform hasn’t responded in any significant manner yet except to apparently vouchsafe their own recommendations to fight targeted attacks.  They also claim that there is, in fact, a limit to how many accounts can be associated with one E-mail address and that users can’t associate a limitless amount of accounts.  This was one of the issues that streamers wanted Twitch to address and fix in the first place.  However, they acknowledge that there exists “some ways for persistent bad-actors to circumvent our limits” which sounds like an admission that they’re limitless to me.  You can’t say that you have limits in place and then admit that it’s possible to get around them.

Although viewer counts dropped significantly for Twitch on September 1, it ultimately had little effect, since numbers went back up the next day.  Twitch even knew the protest was coming and delayed SUBtember by one day, presumably because they knew there would’ve been a significant dip in subscriptions on that day.  On the surface, it sounded like Twitch wanted to show support for the protest, but the cynic in me thinks it could have been so they could hide the fallout from the protest from their shareholders and not have to acknowledge their underlying problems.  If they really were supportive of the protest, they would’ve listened to its message and tried to meet the protestors half way rather than claiming that the smallest demand was already not a problem even though they admitted that it actually was a problem at the same time.

This is the point where most people, including us, like to point out what can be done about a problem.  Well, that’s not changed since the last time we wrote about Twitch.  The tools we pointed out are still available and still effective, arguably more effective than the tools Twitch currently has available.

As far as I can tell, there aren’t any more protests scheduled, and Twitch seems to have all but buried their heads in the sand since then.  Even taking a couple hate raiders to court seems to be nothing more than performative, since it’s hard to imagine only two people accounted for all of the targeted harassment on the platform.  Taking two script kiddies to court doesn’t solve the underlying problems that allowed for such harassment to happen, and all it would take is for others to decide they want to cause problems, and Twitch will be in the exact same position as before.  Yes, they can find who’s doing it, but policing the platform takes time and is frustrating for those who are being harassed.  This is a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and the sooner Twitch puts measures in place to prevent this sort of thing rather than reacting to it after the fact, the better.