Harassed and hacked on Twitch for being autistic.

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Today I sent an e-mail to Twitch. I am autistic.

"I started streaming several days ago and about six times or so I got about 5-20 users in my channel almost at once-- harrassing me, spamming, giving away my private info, and generally communicating about hacking into my stuff. Yesterday my router was hijacked.

Most of it seems similar to a hate crime, as they were constantly remarking to me about my social life, geekdom, cultural expectations such as career and sexual status, and developmental disorders. After being encouraged to stream by some popular streamers, getting this kind of response has been severely disheartening. I've also been dealing with a very heavy emotional crisis lately, and the people coming into my channel just to mock me has only backed up my own feelings of physical and mental worthlessness and drove me to the brink of suicide last night. You see, I spent my entire life coping with mistreatment and neglect from several sets of parents and from many teachers, relatives, and friends-- coping by pursuing self-perfection, knowledge about emotional health, idealism, and community contributions just to find some value in life and so that other people would see me as valuable. And after all these years, I have nothing to show for it but embarrassing attempts at efforts and endless years of mockery from even my friends. I was inadequate even before I was born, and after this Twitch social experience, I think I'm losing what optimism I had for either myself doing something that anybody else will value, or of my expectations of society in general.

I was streaming some impressive content and creating something valuable that would be provided for download by the community; and, while I know that you can't expect a viewership when you first start out, I expected that if I kept streaming, over time people would see and appreciate what I was doing and I could find a little bit of self-worth and value through it. Instead I got about five sincere viewers and about 30 hackers and trolls mocking my existence and taking down my hardware.

What can I do about this kind of thing? Whether it be for security, or for awareness, or anything? I have nobody to talk to about this. I don't know what I can do."

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A lot of the harassment was directly due to being autistic. I was repeatedly called things like "a f**king autist". The autism itself is the biggest or second-biggest cause of my mistreatment in the past.

A lot of gamers don't know what autism is, they just use anything negative-sounding as an insult.

This sort of online hate mob is why I avoid most gaming communities. For those not familiar with this, look up any of the deluge of news about 'gamergate'.

Gaming communities are almost exclusively where I get my friends. It's the only kind of community where I can effectively find people who share most of my interests. Gamers love fiction and art and often producing fiction and art, and they are a statistically intelligent community, allowing me to find friends among them who share some of my other interests.

Edit: In fact, I've been short on available friends lately and have been relying on Twitch for caring social interaction.

There are a few - Star Trek Online and Second Life (which is sort of gaming) come to mind - but in my experience the majority are frothing cesspools of hatred. You have to choose them very carefully, and that only gets more complicated when you are doing something open to the public.

I don't know how I'd deal with your situation, but I wish you luck.

Oh, and if they are breaking into your stuff, enable two-factor authentication on anything that supports it (like Gmail) if you haven't already. And use a password manager (my favorite is keepass). And turn off anything on your computer that listens to the network that you don't need - Dropbox if you don't use it much, Steam when you're not using it, silly cloud things like Razer Synapse, etc.. And get an adblocker and noscript for your browser.

And make sure everything important is backed up somewhere offline!! ! <-- Everyone should do this most important bit anyway.

Two-factor authentication has absolutely crippled my ability to log in so many times. What a f**king mess. I'm just getting angry even thinking about it.

I have an ad-blocker. My life is already too much of a hassle to start using web-crippling "security" fixes like NoScript.

You need to report and block them. Do not reply to their comments, as tempting as it would be to these evil cowardly trolls.

I wish I'd have an answer for you, for during the last couple of years I have been subjected to public mockery, harassment etc. that has had a serious impact on me. I really hope all the best for you. You have survived alot.

I think it might be good to talk openly about what is happening to other people. In Finland one mentally handicapped man was bullied and harrassed by total strangers and the bullying ended when the man's brother notified the local newspaper that made a story of the bullying. By the way isn't it funny that people who think that bullying and harassing a vulnerable person is ok, are still ashamed of their actions to the point they don't want to be linked to them?

By any chance was the game you were streaming either LoL or DoTA2?

As a regular watcher of Twitch I can assure you that most of this attacks happens very, very frequently and to a lot of people.
That's the reason that almost all of the popular streamers have chat moderators, because that thing can turn into a sh** storm if they left it unguarded.
Just by curiosity, what kind of games are ou streaming? Believe it or not some games have communities that can make even NTs feels suicidal. The first one that comes to my mind is the Dota/LoL community (just an example).
Seriously, I've seen people that LIKE those games avoiding to play them frequently because they can't handle the toxic community that they have and I can assure you that almost all of the competitive games that you try to join will have this kind of people plaguing the others fun.
That's a sad reality and I think that the only way to minimize it is by putting some moderators there to help you take care of those jerks. But I can guarantee to you that, unfortunately, depending on the game that you are streaming this kind of problem will be unavoidable.