A recent attack from troll bots has caused Twitch to disable the live stream feature for new accounts. It was found that several videos containing “harmful” content were posted in the Artifact directory on the streaming platform. Twitch’s support team said that they were planning on restoring things back to normal and that the safety of their community is their topmost priority.
“Over the weekend we became aware of a number of accounts targeting the “Artifact” game directory to share content that grossly violates our terms of service. Our investigations uncovered that the majority of accounts that shared and viewed the content were automated,” tweeted the support team of Twitch.
Over the course of the past weekend, several people have trolled and shared memes on Artifact, a card game developed by Valve. As a matter of fact, Artifact was named as the least popular game on Twitch. Many people headed to the Artifact directory on Twitch to berate the game and join in on the ongoing trolling and meme-sharing on the game.
In late March, Valve officially stated that it was going to take time and redesign the economy, experience, game design and more. Hence, it stopped releasing user updates too. Despite these announcements, people have still continued trolling Artifact.
While such trolling and sharing of memes on the game were not clearly violating or alarming for both Twitch and its user community, a sudden burst of new streams had however violated the platform’s policies and turned out to be dangerous for its user community as well.
It was reported by Motherboard that footage from devastating events such as the recent Christchurch shooting and more were shared in the Artifact directory. Twitch later revealed that most of these violating streams were found to be automated.
The company didn’t respond when the users can start live streaming again. It is reported that the moderation team is currently working on removing all the harmful content.
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