Twitch is an online video streaming platform, attracting over 45 million users daily. With 2.2 million active streamers, Twitch is a massive platform. For some Twitch is their main source of income, living off subscriptions, donations and advertisements. Professional Twitch streamers can make a yearly income of $60k to over $120k, making this service vital to their survival.
Brandan Lukus Apple is a 20-year-old Canadian
Brandan from Coquitlam British Columbia could find himself criminally charged with up to 10-years in prison. The British Columbia Supreme Court has accused Brandan of “mischief in relation to computer data”, and permanently banned him from creating, using or distributing any software which may be used negatively towards Twitch. Brandan Apple was allegedly found using a service ChatSurge to overwhelm or spam the Twitch chats of over a thousand streamers. These messages included racist, homophobic and appalling remarks such as “Death to all Jews Death to all Jews”, “We wanna see gameplay not those big jugs”, and “Alla hates Gay KappaPride”. There were also messages with links to sexual content, including child pornography. Over 150 thousand of these messages were being sent at speeds up to 700 messages per minute, completely flooding the broadcaster’s chat service rendering it unusable. Due to the severity of this issue, Twitch claimed to have spent over 300 hours tracking Brandan down and eventually found an IP address, linking him to Coquitlam, British Columbia. There is no word yet from Brandan, but his case will be heard this February.
This Could be a Good Sign for Twitch Streamers
Streamers are in a vulnerable position online, with “internet trolls” being able to quickly take advantage of them. A more serious way streamers have been taken advantage of is these trolls tracking down a streamers address, before using an untraceable phone number to “SWAT” them. They call the police on the streamer for a random serious offense, such as killing someone or holding someone hostage. While the stream is still running, a SWAT team will show up to their house and knock down their door. This obviously can put the lives of people in danger and is no laughing matter. In the case of Brandan Apple, this at least shows streamers that Twitch is trying to make things better for the users of their platform, and trying to offer some more forms of protection. Hopefully, these efforts will place more pressure on governments to add new laws preventing problems that arise in cases such as Brandan Apple’s.
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