Streaming platform Twitch is suing spammers and trolls who flooded the website’s Artifact category in late May with pornography, gore, and copyrighted content.
The company filed a lawsuit in California against anonymous streamers named “John and Jane Does 1 through 100” who were banned for these streams. They’re suing these people for trademark infringement, breach of their contract with Twitch, fraud, and for unlawful use of the company’s platform.
This comes a few weeks after Twitch implemented mandatory two-factor authentication for new users to stream on its platform. That was the company’s latest and definitive action against spammy streams after it prevented new streamers from going live for a few days in an initial attempt to discourage trolls.
Twitch faced such issues when people used Valve’s card game Artifact category on Twitch to stream content that was against the platform’s Terms of Service. These users did so to mock the game’s zero hours watched on the platform on May 17, caused by Artifact’s sharp decrease in popularity since its release.
The accounts of these spammers showed similar behaviors. They would go live with illegal content right away and be banned less than five minutes after that, only to return with another account another five minutes later to stream the same content. Some users were trying to “speedrun” Twitch bans and got suspended from the platform in a bit more than three minutes.
Some trolls coordinated their spam attacks on Discord servers. They shared links to these communities in most of the illegal streams.
Twitch filed the lawsuit on June 14.
H/T Bloomberg
Published: Jun 17, 2019 07:03 am