Today, Wednesday, September 1st, many professional streamers will participate in the #ADayOffTwitch initiative, to spread awareness about the climate of hatred and harassment that is spreading on the streaming platform. The hashtag was launched by ShineyPen, Lucia Everblack, and RekitRaven, in hopes of attracting the attention of Twitch executives as the situation appears to be getting pretty tough.
The #ADayOffTwitch initiative starts
Although the action of bombarding a streamer’s chat with racist, sexist, transphobic and generally offensive messages certainly not new in 2021, this phenomenon has seen a dramatic increase in the past few months, due to some users who employ bots to overwhelm chats with hundreds of automatically generated messages.
Twitch itself does not seem to have managed to resolve the situation, to the point that streamer RekitRaven created the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter to urge the streaming platform to implement better tools to stem the tide of harassment. Twitch, for its part, has promised that measures are on the way, but in the meantime, streamers find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having to fight against hate-based raids every day.
Precisely for this reason #ADayOffTwitch was born, as form of protest against the lack of action by the platform and against the phenomenon itself.
It must be said that not all streamers have enthusiastically welcomed this initiative. For example, small content creators, while recognizing the presence of a problem, are also aware that a single day of absence could totally compromise the fruits of their work. Others are convinced that not directing leads to the opposite result, pleasing those who engage in harassment.
Meanwhile, the big Twitch streamers have not commented on it, while Twitch’s response is slow to make itself heard.