What does Shield Mode do on Twitch? All features, explained

Twitch has introduced a new safety feature called Shield Mode in order to help streamers and community moderators fight harassment. Some believe this new feature is long overdue after increasing hate raids on the platform. When these targeted attacks occur, streamers have a hard time removing the overwhelming amount of hateful messages flooding their chats. Streamers (or their mods) had to manually ban accounts one by one, an already difficult task made even worse due to the offensive nature of the harassment they were fighting.

The streaming platform has come under fire before for not doing enough to prevent hate raids. In a Washington Post report about hate raids, several streamers criticized Twitch for not speaking up about the problem until prodded and for not being transparent about the steps they were taking to combat the raids. Twitch users took matters into their own hands and created their own auto-deleting tools and accounts that categorized bot accounts so that users could block them preemptively.

Now, Twitch has implemented Shield Mode specifically to allow users to fight back against harassment, but how exactly does Shield Mode work?

What does Shield Mode do?

Shield Mode allows users to customize safety settings and implement them when needed. Streamers can choose from settings that limit the users allowed to send messages in chat to either followers or subscribers and can also require phone number or email verification before users can chat. Most of these settings are already available under the Moderation tab in the Creator Dashboard, but Shield Mode allows streamers to quickly toggle their pre-selected safety settings on and off. The goal is to make it easier for users to tighten their safety settings in the case of an attack. When users deactivate Shield Mode, their settings will return to their original state.

Twitch also introduced two new features along with Shield Mode. When activated, streamers and mods can choose to mass ban users commenting certain terms or phrases in the chat. Phrases will be cleared after Shield Mode is turned off so users won’t be banned if they use the phrases innocently after a hate raid. To help prevent accidental or unjust bannings, streamers and mods can access their banned users list and unban users individually. In addition, they can also ban and report users using this feature.

Communities can also block any accounts that haven’t previously commented on their chats as a way of preventing mass bot attacks. Twitch’s goal with Shield Mode is to give creators and communities affected by hate raids a way to protect themselves from harassment on the platform. Hopefully, Twitch continues to listen to their users and their feedback in order to foster a safe and welcoming community.