Following a yr that noticed it wrestle to protect its customers from abuse and harassment, Twitch has revealed a retrospective of its 2021 security efforts that features a look ahead to how the corporate plans to sort out the difficulty in 2022. Specifically, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vp of worldwide belief and security, says the corporate will replace its person reporting and appeals course of.
It additionally plans to improve its Suspicious User Detection characteristic. The AI software, which the corporate launched on the finish of final yr, mechanically flags people it believes could also be repeat ban dodgers. In 2022, Twitch has updates deliberate round how streamers can use data from that software. As the corporate has indicated beforehand, it additionally plans to replace its sexual content material coverage to make clear numerous facets of it. Twitch concurrently intends to share extra and “better” academic content material throughout its security heart and different areas.
Twitch spent a lot of the latter half of 2021 attempting to cease automated “hate raid” harassment campaigns. The assaults noticed malicious people use hundreds of bots to spam channels with hateful language, they usually continuously focused streamers from marginalized communities. In September, the corporate sued CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, two of the extra prolific people concerned in these campaigns.
“We’ll seemingly by no means be capable of remove [hate raids] fully,” Hession mentioned. However, she claims Twitch “considerably” lower down on the variety of bots on its platform by way of a few of its actions in 2021. In 2022, it appears to proceed that work by way of the enhancements it introduced immediately.
If the corporate’s security roadmap feels gentle on particulars, Hession says that’s out of necessity. “The honest and unfortunate reality is that we can’t always be specific because bad actors can and have used that transparency to attempt to thwart our efforts,” she mentioned.
At the identical time, the chief acknowledged Twitch must do a greater job of speaking what it’s doing to make folks really feel secure on its platform. It’s simple to see why the corporate would say that. When it felt just like the hate raids that have been occurring on Twitch couldn’t get any worse, many creators banded collectively to protest the shortage of motion they noticed from the corporate.