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Canadian man faces criminal charges after allegedly spamming Twitch with thousands of hate messages

Canadian man faces criminal charges after allegedly spamming Twitch with thousands of hate messages

A British Columbia man faces criminal charges for apparently hitting 1000 Twitch channels with more than 150,000 spam messages promoting racism, sexual harassment, homophobia, and antisemitism.

20-year-old Brandan Apple is charged with “mischief in relation to computer data,” which could earn him up to ten years in prison if found guilty.

These criminal charges come as a result of a petition from Twitch to Canadian authorities early in 2017 in order to track down the person responsible for the mass spamming.

CBC has reported that Apple is also subject to civil order that prevents him from creating or selling "any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software or other software" with intent to harm or harass anyone using Twitch.

Twitch defense

Twitch said the attacks were “undermining its brand,” according to documents posted by Ars Technica at the time. The company traced those attacks to a program called ChatSurge, which aims to “just simply demolish any TwitchTV chatroom!”

The streaming service stated that it had spent hundreds of hours investigating the attacks.

The messages Twitch referred to include things like “Death to to all jews,” “Allah hates Gays KappaPride,” and “Get the black guy outta here.” Twitch said the “over 375 user reports” they had accumulated also included “false implications of viewbotting and soliciting child sex exploitation material.”

Apple is due to appear in court in February. He's yet to enter a plea in regards to the charges. 


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Editor

Danielle Partis is editor of PocketGamer.biz and former editor of InfluencerUpdate.biz. She was named Journalist of the Year at the MCV Women in Games Awards 2019, as well as in the MCV 30 under 30 2020. Prior to Steel Media, she wrote about music and games at Team Rock.