Twitch is now suing every single person who streamed footage from the New Zealand mosque shooting, Game of Thrones episodes, and straight-up porn on its platform back in May.
The streaming service has some pretty clear rules against using its platform to broadcast such material, but that didn’t stop a group of anonymous streamers from absolutely flooding one part of the site in it all. Oddly enough, that part of the site was Artifact, a highly unpopular digital card game.
Twitch has filed a legal complaint against the trolls who streamed all the banned content, calling them “John and Jane Does 1-100,” according to Bloomberg. That peculiar naming scheme is because Twitch hasn’t actually identified any of the attackers just yet, but hopes to in the near future.
Some of the material the trolls got away with streaming included footage of the March Christchurch mosque terrorist attack, in which 51 people were killed and dozens more injured, according to the complaint. Among the other content was pornography, copyrighted videos, as well as “racist and misogynistic videos.”
The suit alleges that the defendants used fake bot accounts to repost the content whenever one stream was taken down. Twitch said the streams disrupted business by halting all streaming from new accounts for almost two days, but that the trolls managed to circumvent that by using older accounts.
Twitch is currently requesting that all defendants be legally barred from the platform. In general, Twitch is looking for a reward of “restitution and damages, including, but not limited to, enhanced, liquidated, compensatory, special, statutory and punitive damages, and all other damages permitted by law.”
If you’re wondering how these streamers got away with it in the first place, one clue might lay in the fact that the Twitch page for Artifact currently features only five streams. Two of those are clearly full of trolls posting unrelated material–and only around 100 people are viewing that content.
READ MORE:
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H/T Bloomberg
