Twitch unleashes AI tool to spot banned users

 In brief:

 Twitch is introducing a new ML feature to help streamers protect their channels from people attempting to avoid bans. Dubbed "Suspicious User Detection," the tool will automatically flag individuals who suspects may be "likely" or "possible" ban dodgers. In cases involving the former, Twitch will prevent any messages they send from showing up in chat. It will also identify those individuals for streamers and any mods helping them with their channel. At that point, they can decide if they want to ban that person. By default, possible repeat trolls can send messages in chat, but they too will be flagged by the system. "The tool is powered by a machine learning model that takes a number of signals into account […] and compares that data against accounts previously banned from a Creator's channel to assess the likelihood of the account is evading a previous channel-level ban," a Twitch spokesperson said.

Why this is important: 

While Twitch plans to turn on Suspicious User Detection for everyone, the tool won't automatically ban users for streamers. That's by design because it's impossible to create a ML tool that is 100% accurate. The introduction of the tool follows a summer in which Twitch struggled to contain "hate raids." The attacks saw individuals use thousands of bots to spam channels with hateful language. Hate raids became such a frequent feature that some creators walked away from Twitch for a day in protest of the company's lack of action.