Twitch Raiding: Sharing Audiences Through Collective Action or Cyberterrorism?
Twitch is a popular live streaming platform that, at the time of writing this, has 140 million active monthly users. The site, twitch.tv, is home to several online personalities—dubbed “streamers”—who live stream content to people worldwide. Everything from video games such as World of Warcraft to chatting to viewers while swimming in a hot tub can be found on Twitch. Nonetheless, regardless of the content being created and livestreamed to viewers, the action of livestreaming is quite simple: a streamer records themself and simultaneously broadcasts this to viewers who are tuned into their channel on twitch.tv. The big personalities, or better yet, streamers on twitch.tv often find themselves with upwards of 100,000 concurrent viewers watching their live broadcast. Although the beauty of live streaming is the ability to have live, meaningful interactions between streamers and their fans, sometimes this relationship is weaponized as a means for evil.
One of the more interesting functions available to streamers on the Twitch platform is the ability to “raid”. Raiding gives streamers the ability to send their viewers and audience to another channel. Viewers are then given the opportunity and strongly advised to tune into the live broadcast that the streamer they were initially watching chose to raid. For the sake of explanation, imagine finishing a show on Netflix and at the end of the show the cast comes on screen and strongly suggests you check out another show on the platform and then a large button that sends you over to that show appears—that is essentially what a raid is, minus the live component. For most, raiding provides streamers with a way of sharing their audience with other streamers on Twitch. It is generally an act of kindness as audiences and viewership is the biggest measure of success on the platform: the more people you have concurrently watching your live broadcast, the more money you earn from ads ran during your live broadcast. However, sometimes raiding has been used in a destructive way.
If you tune in to the linked YouTube video below, from minutes 9:05 to minutes 9:32, you’ll see a streamer being raided by another streamer. The clip starts off with the streamer being very excited by the surge in concurrent viewership as a result of the raid. Unfortunately, however, as the raid progresses and the new audience invades the streamers live chat, her excitement quickly becomes disdain. In the latter half of the roughly 30 second clip, you’ll see her live chat filled with racial slurs due to her skin color. She even exclaims, “Are you guys all racist?!” This isn’t the first time a marginalized streamer has been abused as result of the raid function on twitch. The occurrence has been labelled hate raiding: “the action of bombing a streamer’s chat with racist, sexist, transphobic, and generally abusive messages” (The Verge). Recently, as a result of the uptick in hate raiding, #TwitchDoBetter trended worldwide. The movement hoped to spread awareness regarding the abuse and hate being weaponized through the raiding function on Twitch. What is effectively cyberterrorism, is somewhat related to what has been presented in class. The notion of collective action accurately explains the mechanism through which hate and abuse are delivered to marginalized streamers through hate raids.
In class, we used heterogeneous thresholds to better understand the idea of collective action. Unlike normal thresholds, heterogenous thresholds describe how influenceable a node is. In the scenario of streamers raiding, audiences are extremely susceptible to being influenced. Each viewer in the audience is a node that is extremely susceptible to being influenced by a streamer. Thus, when the streamer chooses to raid someone else, more often than not, the audience simultaneously raids the other person. This is effectively collective action. Unfortunately, as we illustrated earlier, this collective action is sometimes used as a means for evil—arguably even cyberterrorism. Hate raiding through collective action has had a nefarious effect on the marginalized streamers on Twitch, #TwitchDoBetter.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/11/twitch-do-better-hate-raids/
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22650578/twitch-streamers-walkout-protest-hate-raids
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-use-raids?language=en_US#howdoraidswork