Protect Your Channel: How to Defend Against Twitch Hate Raids and Twitch Follow Bot Spam
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Raids are a wonderful part of twitch culture and are used as a way for streamers to support one another by passing on their audience and a whole lot of virtual love! But unfortunately over the last month, Twitch has seen a huge spike of ‘Hate Raids’ and ‘Followbotting’ to attack and abuse streamers instead of supporting them.
What is a Twitch Hate Raid?
Twitch Hate Raids are when a person – or multiple people – use twitch’s raid feature to abuse a live streamer. Instead of bringing over an authentic and lovely audience, hate raiders flood the streamers chat with hateful and offensive messages from bot accounts. Hate raids come with no warning and are a way to disorientate and overwhelm the streamer so they’re unable to stop themselves and their viewers from seeing the hate speech posted.
What is ‘Followbotting’ (Twitch Follow Bot Spamming)
Followbotting or Twitch Follow Bot spam is similar to a hate raid as they also target a live stream to set off a barrage of follow notifications from offensively named accounts. Like hate raids, followbotting happens without warning and causes hundreds of notifications all at once which are hard to control. Sometimes the twitch follow bots are released to capture IP addresses, other times its just to cause stress, offense and hate towards marginalised groups on Twitch.
Because of the interactive nature of Twitch, streamers often have on screen alerts when someone follows. raids or hosts their stream. In regular terms, these are great and provide a smile and a sense of community for everyone involved. Hate raiders and twitch follow bots are using these alerts and twitch’s lack of security around this to their advantage to terrorise the platform and spread their hate.
Currently Twitch doesn’t have anything in place to protect it’s users from such attacks, but there are steps we as streamers can put in place to protect our channels and our communities….
My Twitch Hate Raid Protocol
Over on my channel we have a protocol in place ready to trigger if we get hit with a hate raid. It’s designed to stop alerts, clear any offensive messages and keep our lovely community safe.
Here are the steps I use to protect my channel:
- Pause Streamlabs Alerts
- Clear the Chat (/clear)
- Put Chat into Sub Only Mode (/subscribers /emoteonly)
- Run an AD/Channel Trailer
- Switch to a Scene without on screen alerts enabled
- Let your viewers know what’s happening
- Clear all recent follow/raid/host alerts
This is a lot to do all at once but it can be done with a few simple commands – especially if you have a mod or two to split these with. You can usually get your channel secured within about 30 seconds to prevent as much damage as possible.
Pausing your alerts stops any more from showing on screen while you clear the chat and switch to subscriber or emote only mode to prevent any more hateful messages being posted.
Running an ad and/or a channel trailer also buys you a few minutes to secure things behind the scenes and clear your queued alerts so they don’t show when you re-start them.
Streamlabs Safe Mode:
Recently Streamlabs created a ‘Safe-Mode’ button that can be found at the top of your recent events dashboard (the little shield icon). Safe mode enables you to trigger multiple items from the list above all at once with the flick of a switch. If you don’t have a stream deck this is the next best thing as a Streamlabs user – especially if you have cloudbot installed.
Stream Deck Panic Button for Twitch
The easiest way to put a hate raid/follow bot protocol in place is with a stream deck. Your stream deck can be programmed to do all of the above actions with just a press of a button. It can also put your stream back to normal with a second press too once you’re safe to carry on.
You can make this happen with a Multi Action Switch and it looks a little something like this:
I also add in a stream marker to help me identify where the raid happened when watching my VOD so I can start removing the twitch follow bots.
You can make your Twitch Hate Raid or Twitch Panic Button protocol as simple or as complex as you like. Over on xameliaxstreams we have all sorts of fun sounds, screens and chat messages popping up to try and make the process fun instead of scary!
How to Ban Users & Twitch Follow Bot Accounts in Chat
To ban a user on twitch, simply type ‘/ban theirusername’ into your chat and they will be unable to post. It’s good practice to regularly go through and ban any known twitch follow bot users and twitch hate raid accounts.
You can often find these lists on twitter, in Twitch Facebook groups and on reddit.
Removing a Twitch Follow Bot
There is a way to mass remove followers from your account on twitch but it must be used VERY carefully or you may end up deleting your entire follower count!
The main way to do this currently is by using the Commander Root Twitch tool – but please, BE CAREFUL.
Remember, as we mention in the ‘growing your channel’ part of the Upgrade Your Stream Guide, follower numbers actually aren’t the most important metric to focus on. It’s better to have a lower number of real followers, than have a higher number of fake/bot ones.
Stay Safe Offline…
Another dirty trick that’s being used right now is spamming streamer’s chat with offensive terms while they’re offline. The twitch trolls then screenshot the abuse in your chat and report your channel to twitch. Streamers are getting banned because of this when they haven’t done anything wrong! Make sure to keep your chat in subscriber or emote only mode while you’re offline to prevent this from happening to you.
I add this action onto my start and end stream buttons on the stream deck so I don’t forget.
Don’t Forget Your Discord!
Our Discord is subscriber only so it’s safe from any hate raiders that wander in via our invite link. But if you have an open server that anyone can join, it’s important to make sure it’s protected from any hate raid over-spill. There are a few ways to do this:
- Set a wait time before users can post in your server
- Set an explicit content filter
- Go subscriber only (this links with Twitch and is an automatic integration)
- Only allow certain roles to post photos and links
Involving Your Community
Over at xameliaxstreams i’ve been followbotted once and hate raided too, but with our safety protocol in place, my viewers didn’t see a thing! We call our safety protocol ‘The Knobhead Protocol’ and we’ve even done a few practice runs so my viewers know what to do! I press the button, it triggers some silly sounds along with our funny channel trailer and my subscribers come to the rescue flooding our freshly cleared chat with love, Toby emotes and their best dad jokes!
We’ve managed to turn this awful event into something quite positive and our community is stronger than ever!
We’ve been told that Twitch is working hard behind the scenes to prevent and fix this problem of Hate Raids and Followbotting, so hopefully they will have a solution for us soon.
But in the meantime I hope these protocol’s and the information I’ve shared today will help you feel safer and enable to you to protect your channel and community in the best way possible.
WANT TO LEARN HOW TO GROW YOUR CHANNEL ON TWITCH?
An easy to understand walk-through on setting up, growing and earning from your Twitch channel.
This guide is for you if:
– You want to be a successful Twitch streamer but don’t know where to start
– You’re struggling to build a community of loyal viewers
– You’re trying to hit affiliate but just can’t seem to get there
– Your channel isn’t growing
– You want to learn how to look more professional
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