#Twitch data breach 2020 software

Twitch added these tags in May, and before that, Everblack founded Peer2Peer.live, an opt-in discoverability tool for marginalized streamers and viewers to find each other. Everblack and other marginalized streamers pushed for Twitch to add identity-based tags to streams so that users could seek out diverse creators to support. But more discoverability features could help Twitch amplify more diverse creators.

Per the leak, the majority of the top streamers are white men, reflecting a larger lack of diversity in the gaming industry - the highest paid woman streamer on the list, Pokimane, is only 39th. Scott Hellyer, a Twitch Partner who has streamed as tehMorag for over nine years, also feels that Twitch prioritizes its top-earning users. “It’s just such a huge deterrent for anyone else, especially those who are BIPOC, LGBTQI+ or disabled.” “They’re basing all of their features solely on that, but the rest of the platform can’t really grow,” she told TechCrunch. About 2,000 streamers made over $100,000 on Twitch in that period. According to a Reddit post analyzing the leaked streamer data from 2019 to the present, 10% of the top 10,000 streamers comprise 49% of total streamer earnings on Twitch.

#Twitch data breach 2020 software

But Everblack, a software engineer by day, thinks that the leak of creator payout data only affirms her feeling that Twitch’s priority is to cater to the streamers that bring in the most money. The leak included data like source code, proprietary software development kits (SDKs) and an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios. “It’s been kind of apparent that safety and security was never at the forefront of what Twitch was doing to begin with.”

“I think it was only a matter of time that something like this would happen,” said Lucia Everblack, a transgender streamer who was one of the organizers of the #ADayOffTwitch boycott. Streamers are boycotting Twitch today to protest the platform’s lack of action on ‘hate raids’ Though Twitch has added new safety features since, tensions remain high in the community. After marginalized creators were repeatedly targeted by hateful bot attacks, some streamers rallied the community to boycott the platform on September 1 for #ADayOffTwitch, which caused the platform’s peak concurrent viewership to drop 1 million viewers below average.

These leaks follow a rocky few months for the Amazon-owned platform, which - as of earlier this year - represented 72.3% of live video game streaming viewership, remaining dominant over platforms like Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming. For many streamers, this leak exacerbates existing tensions over pay transparency in streaming and safety on Twitch. The streaming platform said in a blog post that the leak was caused by an error in a Twitch server configuration change, which was then accessed by a malicious third party. Twitch confirmed yesterday that a massive cache of internal data, including creator payouts, was published online after a breach.