Twitch finally adds a smarter tool to take on bigots, racists, and trolls in chat

The chat that sits alongside livestreams on Twitch is often a nightmare — especially for women. But now the Amazon-owned video platform has introduced a new tool to make it easier for broadcasters to take control of what kind of content is permitted in their chats. The goal is to eliminate ugly situations where racists are able to harass someone like Hearthstone pro Terrence “TerrenceM” Miller on Twitch.

Twitch is launching AutoMod, which is an automated program that will use special algorithms to better understand the intent of a chat message so that it can more accurately block hateful or inappropriate content. This gives streamers more control over what won’t show up in chat when someone writes it, according to Twitch. AutoMod uses technologies similar to what’s found in products like Siri, Google, and Amazon Echo to process natural language. Twitch then combines that with machine learning (an idea that enables computer to learn tasks without people having to specifically program them) to make it so that the tool gets better at identifying unwanted content over time. AutoMod is available now worldwide for English.