A wave of VTubers have been banned after targeted YouTube bot attacks

A wave of Vtubers on YouTube are getting their accounts banned on the platform. The bans are due to targeted bot hate raids that have been impacting Indonesian VTube channels, according to Dexerto. These raids see an army of malicious bots with lewd photos spamming offensive comments in the chat, which YouTube’s automation system sees as a violation of its terms of services and is outright banning the targeted Vtubers on YouTube.

This has led the community on Twitter to try and figure out ways to combat the hate raids. One suggested method is to turn off YouTube’s Live Redirect feature, which is confirmed to not work as a streamer has to confirm a raid meaning the bots are coming through another way, possibly manually sent to specific streams. As for subscriber-only chat mode, it’s been confirmed to not work as bots can just subscribe but member-only chat mode is a possibility.

The affected Vtubers by the raids include Lulana Winternyx, XENON, Keyla Estella, Mika Melatika, Kobo Kaneru, Muan Ibara, and Mai Koinoya. Following creating a new account, Lulana Winternyx revealed in a pinned tweet that YouTube has reversed its decision on the termination of their original account.

There is an option for streamers to go to Twitch but in the past, users on the platform have dealt with similar hate raids before. Minority and LGBT+ streamers, in particular, have had to deal with hateful comments. As for the hate raid problem on YouTube, there currently seems to be no solution, though YouTube could be working on that it will deploy at a later date.