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How to set raids to friends and followers only on Twitch

Protect yourself and your chat with these settings

09/02/2021

Provided by Twitch Currently, there are limited ways streamers can protect themselves using the tools built into Twitch, but even so, there are a few settings streamers can turn on to better protect themselves.

by Ty Galiz-Rowe

Though harassment and bad behavior towards marginalized streamers isn’t new on Twitch, the trend of hate raiding, using bots to spam channels with racist or otherwise bigoted language, has come to a head recently. Currently, there are limited ways streamers can protect themselves using the tools built into Twitch, but even so, there are a few settings streamers can turn on to better protect themselves. One of these is setting raids on any given channel to friends and followers only mode within its settings.

How to set raids to friends and followed only on Twitch

According to Twitch, “Using chat moderation settings, you can reduce spam from an incoming raid or – if need be – shut the raid down entirely.” To do this, streamers need to navigate to their channel’s chat box. Here, select the cog icon in the bottom right corner.

Screenshot of Twitch's chat settings within the Creator Dashboard — Twitch settings menus. | Screenshot provided by author

There are four modes streamers can set their chats to using this setting: Emotes-Only, Subscribers-Only, Followers-Only and Slow Mode. Most of these are fairly self explanatory; emotes-only makes it so viewers can only post emotes, subscribers and followers-only limit a streamer’s chat to just those that follow or subscribe to them, if they’re partners or affiliates. Slow Mode isn’t quite as on the nose, but is still basically what the name implies. With it on, people in chat have to wait a certain amount of time, decided by the streamer, between sending messages.

A screenshot of Twitch's raid settings within the creator dashboard — Screenshot of Twitch Raid settings. | Provided by Seri Lorraine

Additionally, streamers can dig deeper into the settings in their dashboards to further determine who can raid their channels. To do this, navigate to the Creator Dashboard section of Twitch and select the Stream tab on the left side. Raid settings appear right below the Permissions section, and you can choose between three options: allow all raids, only allow raids from friends, teammates and followed channels or block all raids. Choose whichever you prefer and save your new settings.