VTuber Silvervale cried on stream while recounting all the harassment she has allegedly received for playing Hogwarts Legacy.
Silvervale claims to be the most recent victim of extreme harassment on Twitch. According to the VTuber, she has allegedly received death threats, and not only she but also her friends have been doxed. Silvervale Hogwarts Legacy streams have been going for days now.
While the clip has gone viral, and people have taken the chance to attack transgender activists, there is more to the story.
What happened to Silvervale?
Silvervale’s Twitch chat has remained a supportive space. The viewers that disagreed with her choice of the game did it in harmless ways. The situation turned problematic when Silvervale seemingly banned the word “trans” from the chat.
The VTuber defended herself, alleging that it is Twitch Automod who bans the word. However, Twitch viewers have debunked this claim. When Twitch Automod detects a banned word, the message is flagged and put up for review. Then a human mod must decide what action to take.
Seems like all of Silvervale’s mods have decided to delete any message containing the word trans and put the people sending these messages in time-out. While it is reasonable to not let any hateful messages go through, the mods are allegedly punishing people with valid criticism.
On another concerning development, the doxing apparently never took place.
Is Hogwarts Legacy worth it?
Ahead of the release of the game, Hasan Piker said he wouldn’t be streaming the game.
“It is not worth it to get bullied endlessly,” the streamer said.
Trans activists and other marginalized groups had called for a boycott of the game. This initiative comes as a reaction to JK Rowling’s transphobic and antisemitic statements on Twitter.
Twitch completely ignored any type of protest and rolled out a campaign across the website. The advertisements for the game showed on transgender streamers. As a response, these content creators decided to stop streaming on Twitch while the campaign was running.
As it is, the controversy around Hogwarts Legacy is not helping anyone. On the one hand, people have decided to buy the game out of spite just to upset the activists. On the other hand, the waves of extreme harassment that are targeting content creators are making the activists lose their credibility.
Of course, it is impossible to prove who is behind all the harassment. It could be a case of internet trolls taking any opportunity to harass a woman on Twitch, which is sadly a very common occurrence.
While any kind of harassment is wrong, there is a conversation to be had around content creators’ reactions when facing the consequences of their actions. There is an unfortunate habit of engaging in problematic behavior with the only intention of getting views.
In the great scheme of things, being told by your audience not to play a video game is not oppression. Falsely claiming to be a victim of doxing is damaging to the content creator community as a whole. And ultimately, the people facing real oppression are the hundreds of transgender women victims of violent crimes in the United States every year.
