Streamers have little recourse against trolls. A dedicated troll can always make a new account to harass a streamer, and many have found creative ways to be cruel. However, Twitch will be setting an example against one Canadian troll who they are now pressing charges on.

Brandan Apple of British Columbia is in far more trouble than he would have thought trolling would get him. In February and March of 2017, Apple launched an attack on Twitch using a service called ChatSurge, whose purpose is to “flood, destroy or simply demolish any Twitch.tv chatroom.” Apple, who is just 20, went on a trolling spree that spanned over 1000 different streamers’ accounts and sent over 150,000 spam messages. Apple’s spamming of channels made chats impossible to manage and shut down several streamers, and, according to Twitch, significantly slowed the servers down. Twitch then committed over 200 hours of time to tracking Apple through numerous sources before discovering his identity.

Now, Apple faces the criminal charge of “mischief in relation to computer data”, which, depending on the damages Twitch cites, could carry a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison and at a minimum will carry fines of thousands of dollars.

While some of the messages were simple, such as spamming the phrase “you suck,” some went much further and attacked streamers based on their gender, appearance, or orientation. Among the worst of his harassment was to female streamers, where he would spams hundreds of times messages like:

While this represents the first major actions taken by a platform to shut down trolls, it is hardly the first call to arms. In 2015, Ashley Judd took action against trolls who had harassed her following a tweet she had made about a basketball game. While Judd vowed legal action, there is little record of the results of her actions. However, many trolls have had their identities exposed following harassment and subsequently found themselves facing real life backlash such as firings.

However, for streamers in particular, legal action may be the way of the future. Although insults on Twitter are hard to pursue action on, Twitch is the workplace of tens of thousands of streamers who make their living from the platform, and the monetary value of a stream dramatically alters how the law views harassment. A streamer could pursue civil penalties on the grounds of defamation, invasion of privacy, and portrayal in a false light. Additionally, if a streamer could support lose in revenue resulting from streaming, they would have much stronger grounds for filing a law suit.

While it can still be difficult to find the person behind the name, technology is catching up, and new laws are increasingly being created to counter online harassment. In 2012, for instance,  Arizona passed a law outlawing harassment over an electronic device.