Monday, March 26, 2018

Organized harassment & false reports

On 3/26/2018, I ended up finding out that iBreezyy has been going the extent to retaliate against my account for making his griefing public in this video.  The retaliation was to be expected, but I didn't expect him to go as far as slander, abuse of the report function (okay, I suppose this one was to be expected, but not to the extent he's doing it) & recruiting a mass of individuals to make reports to back up his abuse of that same function.  You might claim I can't back this up, well I can actually & it comes from his own mouth.  After re-recording that portion from his own Past Broadcast, I actually had the evidence to make reports against both his Twitch & YouTube accounts.

373 MB download, should stream in most browsers, right-click & save if you want a local copy (video only) or to view multiple times without having to redownload:
Video
Description
 NOTE:  You may receive a ban message if you are in a ban range that includes hacking activity.

This was the first report I made against his Twitch account as prior to finding this in his Past Broadcasts, I did not have any evidence to make a legitimate report against him.  Once I had it, I spent several hours re-recording it & typing an extensive description before filing any reports.  The Twitch report when through without a hitch, however obviously hasn't done anything as of yet.  The report that was sent to Twitch was as follows:
There is a number of reasons why I am reporting this account today, the matter starting back on 2/19/2018 when he chose to grief in a Fortnite mission I was in (https://youtu.be/mcFJSAZtGUI).  I only found out about his channel after the 3rd name change on his account (seems Epic Games allows you to see names changes from your block list).

On 3/19/2018, my Twitch channel got hit with an attack via chat where I ended up having to ban 5 different accounts, which is also when I enabled Follower-only chat to help mitigate attack such as you will see at https://youtu.be/614Emx8pxfk

On 3/24/2018, I saw them entering the channel for another attack, however the Follower-only chat function stalled them from being able to do it & I increased the minimum of that function to 1-day when I realized what was coming.  This was later discussed with a friend (who happened to join around the time they did) about mid-way through my stream located at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/242237338 (Past Broadcast, so this video will expire) & I posted a new blog entry about it when I had finished my stream, which can be found at https://twitch-wondergamer.blogspot.com/2018/03/another-attack-attempt-but-foiled.html.  This attempt was foiled due to that function, but it was attempted & there were a few follows placed in an attempt to do it (details about this are on the blog), I increased the minimum to 30 minutes after ending my stream to deter the likelihood they would attempt it again (it will continue increasing as they continue to try attacking the channel.

Unfortunately I found out today while watching one of his videos that he's been attacking my channel regularly by misusing the report function & as of 3/22/2018 (when his stream was running, which is also where I got evidence of this from) he's also doing the same on my YouTube channel (I would expect also my Epic Games account or any other account he know I have).  Until now I had no evidence to support a report against him, now I do however, so I am using this evidence to make the report & hope something will come of it.  This discussion is done in the last 17 minutes of his Past Broadcast found at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/241771155, I have re-recorded this portion of the video to be used as evidence regarding the organized harassment & attacks on my channel, as well as misuse of the report function & slander, it will be used in a later article on my personal site if the abuse & manipulation of code of conduct to be used in their favor continues to be an issue.  Slander has also apparently become an issue (which this video verifies), I'm expecting I may need to get the police involved if it goes much further...
On 3/26/2018, I ended up finding out that iBreezyy has been going the extent to retaliate against my account for making his griefing public in this video.  The retaliation was to be expected, but I didn't expect him to go as far as slander, abuse of the report function (okay, I suppose this one was to be expected, but not to the extent he's doing it) & recruiting a mass of individuals to make reports to back up his abuse of that same function.  You might claim I can't back this up, well I can actually & it comes from his own mouth.  After re-recording that portion from his own Past Broadcast, I actually had the evidence to make reports against both his Twitch & YouTube accounts.
When I went to report his YouTube channel, I realized 2 things:
  • I wouldn't be able to report his channel because even through I had the evidence to make the report, YouTube does not give you the option to provide supporting evidence on violation reports, so in the end I wasn't able to file it...
  • While trying to find a valid reason to report his channel, I noticed a few that made me determine that having YouTube host that video wasn't the best idea, because it would give him a legitimate reason to report the channel that YouTube might actually act on.  For this reason the video was deleted on YouTube & I decided to instead host it on my personal site, I would be giving details about it later in my YouTube channel's Discussion.
The ironic part here is he's abusing the report function probably daily (while there's no proof to support this, it does seem he's doing it fairly often based on the comments in his video) & getting others to join him in abusing the report function.  If reports against him doesn't penalize his account, his continued abuse of the report function is going to backfire on him, because Twitch will see what he's complaining about, realize he's just trying to cover up a situation, then he'll feel the wrath of his own actions.

Unfortunately most trolls/griefers can not grasp the concept of learning from their mistakes, believing they can never be caught if done over the internet, only choosing to retaliate in a fashion that only further shows theirdemeanor & how poor of a person they actually are.  Some may actually learn from it & change their ways so it doesn't happen again, in some cases I might even be willing to work with them if they apologize & show they can be a decent person (removing or at least hiding all evidence of what happened in the first place), but after the first sign of retaliation, any mercy I may show that individual is off, they get to reap the rewards that they sow.

I have a story with a particularly stubborn individual with the PSN username of EPICMINECRAFT25, where he took it too far (death threats & threats of physical harm) & gave me a reason where I was able to take the matter to the police.  Somewhere between a week or two after the report was filed, the attacks from this individual stopped & I haven't seen any activity on his PSN account since.  It is still undetermined exactly what happened, but I would expect the police showed up at his door, after that is anybody's guess.  The way he acted only gave indication that he was a juvenile & if the police did in fact show up at his door, there's a number of ways it could have played out:
  • He might have been arrested
  • He might have been grounded
  • He might have been too scared to continue his harassment
The fact that his PSN account hasn't had any further activity since then also gives a few possibilities, starting with the same first 2 above, but throwing in the possibility that his PSN account might have been banned (while I would expect his profile to go private if it was in fact banned, the possibility is there as I believed the police had to subpoena either PSN or Twitch to get his personal information).  Full details regarding the matter with EPICMINECRAFT25 can be found here.

I will do what I need to do to get these attacks to stop & continue making the public aware of the situation as they continue to happen.  I have already had to upload this video to my personal site so it wouldn't be subjected to the possibility of my YouTube account getting flagged for a possibly legitimate reason to file a report (he, his friends, followers, subscribers & who knows who else have already filed countless false reports against my accounts if what he's stating in this video is correct, why give him a reason to file a report that might actually succeed), there's really no reason in me not adding his Twitch account as a new entry on my personal site anymore.

UPDATE:  I later decided to increase my Follow-only chat minimum to 1 day to match how many days this shit has kept me from doing streams on my channel, it may later be increased if the attacks continue.

One other thing to point out is what happened on my YouTube channel on 3/22/2018.  It's already been mentioned that they reported it & it was stated they were going to comment on the video, however I noticed a comment was never left (probably because they realized that comments were moderated & it would never see the light of day on that video, that's not to say I wouldn't keep logs of it or publish it somewhere else as further evidence of abuse by iBreezyy & his friends, follower, etc.), but they did happen to downvote it on that same day:
This really doesn't do much, while the options to upvote or downvote are still there, I've had to mitigate downvote abuse in the past, so these statistics aren't public for that reason (which was disabled at the same time that comment moderation was enabled).  I have both of my channels locked down for a reason & situations like this only show why it needs to be done.  Follower-only chat is currently set to 24-hours on my channel specifically because of these situations (I never wanted people to feel obligated to have to follow to chat, but I will enable it when the channel is getting attacked like what happened on 3/19/2018), where the excessive amount of time is probably deterring users to keeping a follow they may have had on the channel, but if the loss of new followers comes at the expense of a lack of security against further attacks, I'm okay with people not following to have a higher chance of mitigating further attacks against the channel (I don't stream to get follower or donations anyways; I play games to have fun & stream only in case people want to watch, it's their decision where they want to take it from simply watching, however I won't tolerate abuse/discrimination against myself or others in the channel).  The other option is I could turn on auto-moderation, however this would probably be too much trouble to deal with as I don't have moderators on my channel, it might be something I'll look at later (provided I can block/moderate everything & define a user whitelist to pass through auto-moderation, this might become an option in the future).

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