Episode Transcript
bbno$ speaking to a crowd: Get a hell yeah!
Crowd: hell yeah!
bbno$: Twitchcon!
Crowd: Twitchcon!
bbno$: Right click!
Morgan Sung, Host: Two weekends ago, the live streaming platform Twitch held its 10th annual TwitchCon. That’s Twitch’s annual convention in San Diego for all things streaming and gaming. And the tape you just heard was the rapper turned cosplayer, bbno$, performing at one of the creator after parties.
bbno$: F*ck yeah, TwitchCon!
Morgan Sung: I went into this weekend’s planning to cover Twitch’s evolution as an influential platform for political speech. These creators have massive audiences and have the potential to educate and inspire entire generations into civic engagement. And my quest to talk to them brought me here…
bbno$: Right click!
Morgan Sung:TwitchCon has had its controversies in the past, from the infamous foam pit that severely injured multiple attendees to streamers from the rival platform Kick sneaking in to harass Twitch creators. But this time, the event was held in the shadow of this country’s mounting political violence, most notably the recent assassination of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk. In the weeks leading up to the convention, high-profile streamers like Hasan Piker dropped out of the event citing concern over public safety and political violence.
Hasan Piker speaking during a livestream: I’m worried about the safety of others. I don’t want to put them in the f*cking crosshairs if some psycho freak decides like, I’m gonna go there. I’m very publicly not going to TwitchCon for that reason.
Morgan Sung: And concerns about safety boiled over completely when, on the first day of the event, a streamer named Emiru was assaulted during her Twitch-organized meet and greet. A man was able to cross multiple barriers through other creators’ meet and greet lines before he grabbed Emiru and tried to forcibly kiss her. In a statement, Twitch said that, “Law enforcement and event security were on site and responded to the incident.” But Emiru said that event staff didn’t step in to stop him. It was her own private security that intervened.
Emiru speaking to an audience : Like, if you watch the clip, the security guard who pushes the guy away is my security, the woman who pulls me to the back, my manager. If you’re a small streamer and you don’t have those resources or someone in your line is not filming, what the f*ck do you do?
Morgan Sung:Twitch did significantly beef up security before this year’s event. We’re talking more surveillance, more bodyguards, the whole nine yards. Still, the assault haunted TwitchCon all weekend. Other streamers, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, posted that they were nervous about going to the convention center. Some hired their own private security last minute, or even canceled their meet and greets. Several posted about getting harassed by fans and other male streamers during the event.
On the last day of the convention, Twitch hosted an open Q&A for streamers and fans to talk directly to the company’s CEO, Dan Clancy. Finally, in the middle of the panel, an attendee stepped up to the mic.
Q&A Attendee: How’s it going? I’ve been coming to TwitchCon since 2016. I love Twitch’s platform. I think the elephant in the room right now is just like there’s a lot of big creators that don’t necessarily feel that this is the safest space in person or necessarily online and I was just curious as to the additional steps that Twitch is going to take to make that, to change that.
Dan Clancy during Q&A: Livestreaming offers some advantages in terms of the ability to control your community, but it’s still this issue that people of all sizes, it’s not just, you know, women of course have a challenge, but also underrepresented groups often have this problem of harassment online. And it’s something we care deeply about and we’re always looking for how we continue to invest to help protect creators as they go on their journey. So thanks for the question.
Morgan Sung: This weekend was a reckoning for Twitch. The streaming community has been embroiled in debate over the culture of misogyny on the platform and the parasocial relationships that endanger creators. And it highlighted questions about the role of political commentary in streaming, a genre of content that’s exploded in the last few years, establishing Twitch as more than a gaming site. Now it’s a legitimate platform for political discourse and not everyone is happy about that.
Today, we’re diving into Twitch, political speech online, and whether creators have anywhere else to go if they can’t talk about it on Twitch. This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Many people associate political commentary with traditional formats, like broadcast talk shows and op-eds, that kind of thing. But over the last few election cycles, an alternative information ecosystem has been growing across social media, including Twitch. But throughout its growth, Twitch hasn’t figured out how to handle this kind of content, from moderation to responding to public backlash. And as commentary streamers gain more influence Twitch has faced increasing scrutiny from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who aren’t thrilled about this growing sphere of leftist discussion. Some are pushing Twitch to crack down on political speech and after the Charlie Kirk shooting, that pressure has been kicked into overdrive.
To understand how we got here, let’s go back to the very beginning by opening a new tab. When did Twitch get so political?
To get into this, let’s talk to my friend Nathan Grayson, co-founder and reporter at Aftermath. It’s a worker-owned publication reporting on video games. He’s also the author of Stream Big, which explains the history of Twitch by profiling nine different streamers. Twitch has changed and morphed many times since it spun off from the live streaming site Justin.tv in 2011. And for much of that time, Twitch had a singular focus, gaming.
Nathan Grayson, Guest: For a long time in Twitch’s history, you were required to be playing a video game while streaming, like that was a rule and people tried to get around it and all these like really funny ways. Like there was an era where somebody would like invert kind of the size of their camera views. So instead of the game being really big and them being small, they’d be huge and there’d be a tiny little like bit of gameplay in the corner. That wasn’t technically allowed so people would get in trouble for it. But yeah, so it was that kind of a thing. And so it was pretty hard, you know, to like be a political commentator when you also had to be like, keeping up with a League of Legends match and Twitch finally said like, ‘Hey, you know, you guys clearly want to just talk to your audiences. We hear you, we’re going to let you.’
Morgan Sung: In 2017, Twitch launched two new categories, Just Chatting and IRL, short for in real life. They paved the way for a new type of streamer, a chronically online talk show host. Hasan Piker, who was then a producer for the Young Turks, started streaming on Twitch the next year.
Hasan Piker speaking to a livestream audience: What’s going on, everybody? I’m going to get really quickly into it. OK, today we have an awesome episode…
Nathan Grayson: He started getting big around 2019, you know, it was like, he started that year with like a hundred thousand followers and ended it with like close to half a million. And so 2020, I think definitely, especially like, allowed us all to take off because we were all stuck inside as a result of the pandemic and there’s an election. The internet, when it comes to politics, especially, and then these like major events in the political landscape, like elections, it’s just chaos. There’s so much happening. And the role that somebody like Hasan serves is that they curate it for you, you know? And they do it in a language that you, as somebody who regularly like browses the internet, can understand.
Hasan Piker speaking to a livestream audience: So let me like walk you through it. The reason why you push for a shutdown in this situation is to really highlight what you are seeking to protect, okay? And what you’re seeking to protect in this circumstance is $800 billion of cuts for Medicaid.
Morgan Sung: What is it about this particular moment in internet history that made political streams so popular on Twitch, beyond just Hassan?
Nathan Grayson: I mean, one of the things is a pandemic. You cannot understate the importance of that moment in that I would say that is when everybody’s world inverted. Before that, real life was the main thing and the internet was supplementary to it. And then with everybody stuck inside because of the pandemic, suddenly the internet became the real thing and real life with supplementary to it. And we never really went back. And as a result, I mean like, you know, the pandemic itself is heavily politicized. Um, there was a big election that year, you know, Trump and Biden, which was going to decide the future of America. Um, not long after January 6th happened.
All of these landmark political events as like, you now, Gen Z in particular was coming of age, they were becoming kind of, I guess, like politically activated in that moment. And these are the people doing the job because, you know, the old institutions were failing them. A lot of news networks were not covering this moment, um, accurately or usefully. And then you had people like a Hasan step and be like, okay, ‘well I’m gonna tell you how things are actually as I see them’ as opposed to like, you know, it’s business as usual because it clearly wasn’t.
Morgan Sung: Then there is this pivotal moment for pandemic-era politics online, the Among Us stream. In 2020, in the weeks leading up to the election, representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar hosted a voter outreach event entirely on stream. They invited popular creators to play Among Us, a game that had become a phenomenon during the pandemic. Everyone plays as cute little characters, but one of them is a secret killer. If you’ve ever played Mafia, you get the idea.
[Game play conversation]
Speaker 1: Ilhan you need to vote. You need to click on AOC and then… AOC: Are you, are you really gonna do this to me, Ilhan?
Ilhan: No, I’m not voting for Alex.
AOC: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Nathan Grayson: Among Us was the game at that time because Among Us allowed people to, you know, have a place to play together during this time of intense separation. And so it blew up and like, they capitalized on that zeitgeist and they’re like, yeah, as a politician, I’m going to play it with a bunch of people that you’ve heard of. So I’m gonna reach these new audiences, maybe you’ve of me, but like, don’t really know me that well and aren’t that into politics. And these streamers definitely are political streamers, aside from Hasan. Most of them are semi-progressive, but they’re not like experts in the field.
And so, yeah, they, they pulled, you know, hundreds of thousands of viewers, um, and just generally managed to do something that nobody really had before, at least in that space. And I think at the time, a lot of people saw that and they said, okay, you know this is it, this is the new politics meta.
Morgan Sung: Hasan’s popularity and influence, and all of the other political streamers that followed in his footsteps, launched Twitch into the spotlight. But all of that attention comes with a hefty dose of criticism. It’s something Denims has become very familiar with. She’s a political streamer who basically runs a morning talk show on Twitch, streaming five days a week.
Denims, Guest: I think Hassan really put Twitch on the radar in a more general sense because prior to that it was just like, oh, isn’t that some gaming website if you even knew about it at all.
Morgan Sung: Yeah. How has your experience as a political content creator changed on Twitch?
Denims: A lot of people were a lot more lackadaisical with how they would stream and I think I’ve noticed myself as well as a lot other people be a lot cautious with the things that they talk about because there are a lot bad faith actors that do want to see left-wing voices silenced. I mean, under the Trumpian era, he’s practically just saying if you have an opinion that isn’t pro-me, I don’t want you on the air. That’s the reason Kimmel got off the air. Because Donald Trump didn’t want him on the air because he didn’t like the things that he was saying because he was making fun of Donald Trump. So yeah, it does feel like everyone has to be more cautious on Twitch because there’s a bigger magnifier on it.
Morgan Sung: Today’s political climate is very different from the one that Hasan began streaming in. The vibe has shifted, and the stakes are higher. What does this mean for Twitch? And more importantly, what does it tell us about the state of political speech online? We’re diving into that after this break.
Okay, we’re back. Time to open another tab. Is political speech still allowed on Twitch?
Politicians have been trying to capitalize on Twitch’s popularity among young voters for years, with mixed results. Former Congressman Matt Gaetz, for instance, streamed on Twitch and peaked at six viewers. Then you have Senator Bernie Sanders going on stream and learning a lot about the internet.
[Audio from Bernie Sanders livestream]
Poki: Mr. Sanders, my name’s Poki. So nice to meet you. I’m a big fan, as you can tell.
Bernie Sanders: Thank you very much.
Saikuno: I’m Saikuno. Do you know what a VTuber is? Have you heard of a Vtuber before?
Bernie Sanders: Nope.
Saikuno: No.? That’s all right. I’m the first one.
Speaker: Yeah, it’s the first one.
Saikuno: Thank you so much for supporting Vtubers.
Morgan Sung: And then there’s California governor Gavin Newsom showing off his elite gaming skills.
[Audio from Fortnite Friday w/ Governor Gavin Newsom]
Connor Eats Pants: Gavin press press the press the X button or Y.
Governor Gavin Newsom: Oh, yeah, where am I man? Where are we? No, sorry.
Morgan Sung: That last clip is from a few weeks ago, when Newsom joined Fortnite Friday, a weekly show in which a streamer who goes by Connor Eats Pants interviews guests while they play Fortnite. The quality of the guests’ play varies.
[Audio from Fortnite Friday w/ Governor Gavin Newsom]
Governor Gavin Newsom: Jesus Christ, I closed things out. See, I don’t like this Nintendo Switch stuff. I’m back in, man.
Morgan Sung: Here’s Aftermath reporter Nathan again.
Nathan Grayson: A lot of those are not necessarily political streamers, political content creators and so if you do it right, you’re reaching people you would never otherwise reach. And the way that you do that is a little different than like, you know, I’m gonna go on this debate and talk about my policies. It’s, I’m going to talk to this person that, you know, other people find relatable, and I’m just gonna like, hang out, laugh, tell jokes, get a little bit more personal with things, or at least appear more personal. You know, that the ConnorEatsPants stream with Gavin Newsom is illustrative because I think that Gavin Newsom talked a very big game and then, you know, a few days later vetoed a bunch of pro-trans legislation after being like…
[Audio from Fortnite Friday w/ Governor Gavin Newsom]
Governor Gavin Newsom: You know, you’re talking to a guy who’s been a champion of LGBT rights. I take a backseat to no one in signing more bills for the community.
Nathan Grayson: I think that we’re also seeing, like, at least in the case of somebody like Connor, you know, these people who came up on the internet, pretty young, like growing up. And even as he was like, kind of decamping from the Gavin Newsom stream, he was talking about how like, he’s had to kind of become better versed in a lot of these things as he’s talked to more and more political figures. He’s also interviewed people like George Santos.
And so people were asking him why he didn’t push harder on a couple subjects and he was like, ‘I just didn’t feel like I was informed enough to do it well, and I want to do it right instead of, you know, like stumbling through it and then letting him off easy,’ Um, but he still did a crazy good job. I mean, like, I don’t know if anyone has held Gavin Newsom’s feet to the fire on like Israel Palestine stuff that well, he just like kept him on track. It was really impressive.
Morgan Sung: While playing Fortnite, it was incredible.
Nathan Grayson: And he’s good at Fortnite too. Gavin Newsom is not good at Fortnight.
[Audio from Fortnite Friday w/ Governor Gavin Newsom]
ConnorEatsPants: You closed out of it on the switch.
Governor Gavin Newsom: I know. I don’t like this. I can’t, this switch is not suboptimal.
ConnorEatsPants: You gotta get a Switch 2, they fixed it.
Morgan Sung: But it seems like political streamers on Twitch have faced constant backlash in the last few years. What was the turning point for this? Like, when did they suddenly become so controversial?
Nathan Grayson: I mean, Israel/Palestine, um, and in particular Hasan being pro-Palestinian because then you had all of these other people trying to bring him down because he’s such an outspoken and like visible pro-Palestinian voice.
Morgan Sung: A few years ago, Hasan collaborated with another YouTuber, Ethan Klein, on a weekly politics and culture podcast called Leftovers. They don’t work together anymore.
Nathan Grayson: October 7th occurred and they started to drift in terms of their viewpoints.
Morgan Sung: For context, Ethan’s wife is Israeli. Hasan and Ethan did one last very emotional, hours-long episode of Leftovers together, in which they try to explain their opposing views to each other. But they ultimately put the show on hiatus.
Since their breakup, Ethan has gone from criticizing Hasan’s political stances to making frequent personal attacks about Hasan and anyone critical of Israel. Hasan, meanwhile, started gaining more mainstream attention and viewership, and has rarely acknowledged Ethan since.
Nathan Grayson: But then Ethan was like, well, then I’m gonna come after people that you know. And that’s like what resulted in those streamers getting banned after the TwitchCon panel and all that. And ever since then, it’s been much more personal and much more of a back and forth.
Morgan Sung: When Nathan says ‘streamers getting banned after a TwitchCon panel,’ he’s actually referring to an incident with denims.
Denims: I got banned for 30 days for a tier list about who can say the word habibi, which is just the arab word for like love or like my love.
Morgan Sung: Last year, Denims participated in a panel, organized by Twitch, with other Arab-American creators. They made a tier list—it’s a meme format for ranking things. At the top of the list were creators who Denims and the other panelists deemed worthy of saying Habibi. The tiers ranked from Arab, Arab-coded, asks permission to say Habibi, thinks the word is a slur and then…
Denims: On the bottom of the list, it says “loves Sabra”, because sabra is a sh*tty type of hummus that’s not good. And anyone who’s had Sabra and had actual good hummus, you know that Sabra’s got this bitter taste. It’s like buying freezer pie. It’s just not good. Like, you should just make it from scratch. And so if you love Sabra hummus you’re like, this is my favorite hummus, you do not get the pass, you don’t get the pass.
Morgan Sung: Analysts placed Ethan Klein in the loves Sabra category. He very quickly posted his response.
[Clip from Twitch Has a Major Problem Youtube post]
Ethan Klein: I mean, it’s kind of just Arab good, Jew bad. I mean I’m having a hard time seeing this any other way.
Morgan Sung: Some critics claim that it was deeper, because Sabra, the hummus brand, was a boycott target over its parent company’s support of the IDF. Then others pointed out that the word Sabra, a prickly pear cactus fruit, has been used to describe Jewish people born in Israel. One of the panelists was Jewish, but that didn’t stop the accusations of antisemitism. Clips of the panel went viral, kicking off a frenzy of backlash.
Denims: We make multiple references to hummus on that panel. So we’re very clearly talking about hummus. But there was this massive campaign to pretend like, no, we were making this Jew to Arab tier list, which is insane. It doesn’t make any sense because we put a bunch of people who weren’t Jewish, myself included in the bottom tier list.
Morgan Sung: It’s worth noting that all five of the creators on that panel are left-leaning and make content about supporting progressive political issues. And they’re all vocally pro-Palestine.
Denims: …and Twitch caved and banned us for 30 days, which was insane because again, you’re just telling the platform, you’re telling everyone on that platform, hey, if you pressure us hard enough we’ll just cave and wrongfully ban anyone you want which is not, it’s not good for the health of the platform.
Morgan Sung: Nathan described Twitch’s approach to moderating political content as haphazard. The site was relatively left-leaning until recently, thanks to Hasan’s influence and the platform’s strict policies against harassment and hate speech. These violations are pretty clear-cut when a streamer says a slur, for example. But Twitch has struggled to draw clear boundaries around political speech. Critics say the company tends to cave to backlash.
Nathan Grayson: Twitch is always reactive when it comes to this stuff. They are not proactive. They don’t really know how to moderate this. I think that they don’t mind that because it gives them legitimacy, but they also don’t want to engage with the full ramifications of it. So they’re just sort of flying by the seat of their pants.
Morgan Sung: Denims, for one, has been frustrated by this inconsistency. She and the other panelists received 30-day bans for last year’s Twitch con tier list. Asmongold, a right-wing political streamer, was banned for 14 days for violating Twitch’s hateful conduct policy with a racist tirade against Palestinians. Denims noted that other creators have been allowed to return to the platform, even though they’ve received multiple bans for saying slurs on stream. But streamers who talk about politics, even if it’s just explaining a news story, are under more
Denims: It’s sad because it doesn’t actually matter what you’re doing on Twitch. You can do basically anything on Twitch and you won’t get banned for it, almost anything, as long as there isn’t anyone actively trying to organize a campaign to get you banned. They’re in desperate need of help on figuring out how to handle politics on Twitch
Morgan Sung: Ethan Klein’s efforts to pick fights with Hasan, and anyone associated with him, have also been picked up by actual elected officials. Like last year, when Congressman Ritchie Torres penned an open letter to Twitch executives, calling on them to rein in anti-Semitism on the platform. He cited Hasan’s comments criticizing Israel, which Hasan said were clipped and taken out of context.
The backlash against progressive voices on Twitch has been mounting since Trump took office. Charlie Kirk’s death only intensified it. The accused shooter Tyler Robinson had made references to memes and video games in his Discord messages and on the bullet casings. In the days following the shooting, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested the attendance of the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Reddit, and Twitch at a hearing on radicalization and extremism on their sites.
The hearing was postponed because of the government shutdown, but the increased criticism of online political speech has made talking about current events especially complicated for streamers like Denims.
Denims: On Twitch, if you say anything and there are any people hate-watching, they will try as hard as they can to clip you, right?
Morgan Sung: …Clipping as in literally pulling clips from streams and posting them on Twitter or TikTok and sites like that. Sometimes viewers will go out of their way to post clips out of context.
Denims: And I think I’ve just gotten, again, so internet brainrotted that when I speak, I will speak in full sentences and like, reiterate points over and over and over again. So, like, during the Charlie Kirk assassination, I said multiple times, like every two sentences I was saying, ‘I don’t condone the assassinating of any political content creators or political media influencers, or any of these any pundits.’ Like, because you have to because you can’t say any sentences without immediately having that because you wanna make it as hard as possible to be clipped for anything you say to be posted. Cause even the few things that I have been clipped for, it’s like you play for like another 20 seconds and there’s context there. What I will say is it’s just more frustrating than it is anything else because we should collectively be able to talk about issues without worrying whether or not there was enough context in a 30 second clip.
Morgan Sung: But would Twitch ever really ban political content? And if they did, is there any space on the internet to still engage in these conversations?
Let’s open one more tab. Where can you stream besides Twitch?
It’s super unlikely that any creator would be able to launch and maintain their own version of Twitch.
Nathan Grayson: Creating a site like that is easier said than done because streaming is super expensive. You know, this has been Twitch’s own problem over the years. Twitch is not profitable, has not been profitable because there’s just so much bandwidth involved and when you are a streaming platform, your operation becomes more expensive as it gets bigger. And so in some ways it’s bad to grow, but, you know, it’ll be interesting to see.
Morgan Sung: Adding to the economic complexity is the fact that political content on Twitch rarely has ads. That’s because last year, Twitch rolled out a label for politics and sensitive social issues. Streamers have to label their content if they include former or current politicians talking about policies, coverage of elections, discussions of foreign policy, and any commentary and topics like gender, race, sexuality, or religion in a, “polarizing or inflammatory manner.” Basically, it lets advertisers opt out of advertising next to anything political and it also silos this kind of content. I asked Denims if she’d ever jump ship if Twitch continues to demonetize political speech.
Denims: Not really, no, because your alternatives are like streaming on YouTube, streaming on TikTok, which I don’t know to be fair, how good or bad TikTok live streaming is. I genuinely just like, I struggle to use the platform because I’m just not Zoomer enough yet for it. And then what’s the alternative like Kick? Yeah, you can be right next to the other 1700 gambling streamers. So there isn’t really, like, another place that I think a lot of people could call home. I think most people would end up just going to YouTube, which again should incentivize Twitch to improve their platform because why would you want to lose a bunch of creators to YouTube?
Morgan Sung: Yeah. After the shooting and after the response and all these crackdowns, a lot of people were speculating that Twitch would just ban political content in response to that. Do you ever see that happening?
Denims: No, I don’t think Twitch will ever ban political content. I think that they understand that it’s too lucrative is the wrong word, but that it legitimizes the platform too much for them to remove it. It’s the same reason that YouTube would rather go through all of these proceedings with Congress than ever take down political content on YouTube because they enjoy the hegemony that they have over media.
And it’s the thing with Twitch. Twitch doesn’t wanna lose its spot as being like the number one live streaming platform because they decided they couldn’t handle the heat of politics. I think that they want it. And I think they want that market share. I think that they just don’t know how to thread the needle just yet.
And I feel like there’s been a massive pushback against general right-wing restriction of freedom of speech. And so I feel on Twitch, yeah, people are more cautious, but I think also people want to see other people fight and people want to fight. I mean, at one point, was it four million people canceled their like Disney subscription because Kimmel got put off the shelf? Like, that’s insane.
Morgan Sung: The congressional hearing on radicalization and online extremism was supposed to happen earlier this month. It’s unclear when or if the hearing will be rescheduled. The pressure to crack down on political speech isn’t unique to Twitch. Like we’ve talked about on the show before, this suppression is happening all over the internet. So then, what does the future of political streaming look like?
Nathan Grayson: That’s hard to say. I think that if Twitch has its way, things won’t change too much, which of course, I don’t think they want anything to really change. They just wanna keep adding more layers of monetization to the site. But, you know, the hearing could go any number of ways and so at least in some regard, it will decide that future. If Hasan gets banned, then that’s an entirely different set of circumstances. That’s like a whole different reality. You know it’s the flap of the butterfly’s wings. Like we’ll see. I cannot predict that.
Morgan Sung: The uncertainty hasn’t discouraged Denims from streaming. She’s been sued, doxed, harassed, and threatened, but she’s determined to keep her morning show going. For her, it’s about more than free speech than politics.
Denims: I just believe in what I say and I want to say what I believe and I think what I believe is empathy driven and it’s encouraging a world that makes everyone’s life better.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with you, I still want you to have health care. Whether or I agree, I still want you have housing. I still want you to have clean water, clean air. I think it’s cowardly to stop fighting for that, especially from, like, the comfort of my own home. Even if it, like, means a bunch of people will hate me, I don’t really care. It’s hard to care when I know that what I’m talking about is just improving everyone’s lives.
Morgan Sung: What’s happening on Twitch is a case study on the political content creator sphere as a whole. Across social media, across all the apps, these creators have amassed influence. The new generation of political pundits has proven that this niche can be lucrative. These content creators are incredibly valuable for social media companies if they’re making money, and also valuable to political figures to access new audiences. That is, until people use platforms like TikTok and Twitch to express dissent.
And yet… People love to post, and they love consuming content. There will always be a demand for this kind of commentary, especially as younger generations rely on political content creators to explain the news. So we don’t know what the future of political streaming looks like, but it’s clear that it’s not going away anytime soon.
Let’s close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode is produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa. Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor.
Additional editing by Chris Hambrick and Jen Chien, who is KQED’s director of podcasts. Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager and Ethan Tovin-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.
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