With messages flying by at speeds literally too fast for a human to read, manual moderation is an uphill battle on some of the most popular Twitch channels. That situation has led to plenty of instances where popular streamers have been deluged with waves of racist or sexist abuse that even quality human moderators can have trouble stemming.

Twitch is offering a new tool in the fight against chat room trolls today in the form of AutoMod. Rather than relying on humans to flag and take down inappropriate messages after they're posted (and quite possibly after the streamer has already read them), AutoMod tries to detect those messages automatically and preemptively send them to a moderation queue for approval or dismissal. Streamers can choose four different levels of aggression for the AutoMod system to crack down on disagreeable content in four different categories: identity, sexual language, aggressive speech, and profanity.

While trolls will no doubt immediately try to find ways to get around AutoMod's filtering, Twitch claims its tool goes well beyond banned wordlists to "employ machine learning and natural language processing to identify and block inappropriate content from appearing in chat," according to a press release. "Beyond identifying inappropriate words and phrases, AutoMod can detect potentially inappropriate strings of emotes and other characters or symbols that others could use to evade filtering."

We'll have to see how well that kind of machine learning fares in the face of some of actual Twitch viewers, who have proven to be some of the most determined trolls on the Internet. But Twitch's effort can make use of the muscle behind Amazon's AWS Machine Learning platform, and it could presumably draw on the same kind of natural language processing efforts that help power the Amazon Echo. That gives us some hope that AutoMod will be able to keep up with the worst the trolls can dish out.

AutoMod is currently available in English, and it works in beta form in Arabic, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Streamers can turn the feature on via their personal settings page.