Twitch suing trolls who streamed porn and gore in Artifact category

By Olivia Richman

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Jun 18, 2019

Reading time: 1 min

Still bothered by the inappropriate activity on Twitch’s Artifact category last month? Well, Twitch is looking to do something about it.

The streaming platform is suing the spammers and trolls who bombarded the Artifact streaming category not only with copyrighted content, but also with disturbing pornography and grahic gore. 

On June 14, Twitch filed a lawsuit in California against “John and Jane Does 1 through 100,” anonymous streamers who were banned for their illegal content. The charges include trademark infringement, breach of their contracts with Twitch, fraud, and unlawful use of the streaming platform. 

The Artifact category has been quite a nuisance for Twitch. When trolls noticed that the game was effectively dead on Twitch on May 17, they began relentlessly streaming a mix of illegal and disturbing content, continuing on no matter how many accounts were banned or suspended.

In fact, some accounts seemed to be purposely getting themselves banned in just a few minutes, only to be back up and streaming the same content moments later. The trolls had their own Discord server dedicated to promoting their illegal streams. 

The resulting pornography and footage of beheadings resulted in the most activity Artifact had seen in months. 

But it also resulted in Twitch implementing a mandatory two-factor authentification for new users to stream. The popular streaming platform noted that many of the accounts that shared and viewed the illegal content were automated bot accounts. 

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