Twitch is accusing a Canadian man of flooding the streaming platform with over a hundred thousand spam messages and is taking legal action against him.
The person in question is Brandan Lukus Apple, a British Columbia resident who is being charged with “mischief in relation to computer data” according to a legal document filed in the B.C provincial court. He already faces a restraining order that prohibits him from making, “any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software or other software” that may hurt Twitch’s reputation.
The court has ordered Brandan Apple to appear in court in Port Coquitlam in February to face the criminal charge. It’s important to note that the charges, so far have not been proven in court.
Brandon Apple reportedly sent over 150,000 messages using some 1000 Twitch ‘channels’, at a rate of almost 600 messages a minute per channel.
The messages sent contained a variety of racist, homophobic and crude language with links to pedophilic and other similarly disturbing content. Twitch employees traced the activity to a site called ‘chatsurge.net’ and were eventually lead straight to Brandan Apple.
This was around the same time the restraining order was filed against Brandan last year in May. Twitch, however, seems to be taking stronger against Brandon in an effort deter any future ‘spambot’ creators.
Originally starting off as Justin.tv, Twitch was later acquired by Amazon in 2014 for almost a billion dollars. Twitch is now the leading live streaming service for video games in the United States and has over 15 million daily users on its platform.
In other Twitch related news, Twitch has signed an exclusive deal with Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch League worth 90$ million dollars; giving it exclusive streaming rights to the eSports league.
What do you think of Twitch’s recent action? Are they being too harsh or will take the matter to court deter any future prankers? Let us know in the comments.
