“I’m a firm believer that World War Three is already happening,” Hasan Piker said to his stream, as he explained, with tweets and mainstream news, Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Iran at the weekend.
Hasan Piker is the name to know when it comes to political streamers on Twitch.
The streaming platform — most known for its live video game broadcasts — is now also a destination for Gen Z and Millennials to get news and commentary, particularly US news. And they’re getting it from people like Piker.
For eight hours a day — every day — Piker talks politics as tens of thousands of his 2.7 million followers drop in and out. Piker has been streaming since 2018, and in the past two years, his followers on Twitch have more than doubled.
Hasan Piker is one of the biggest political influencers on the streaming site Twitch. Credit: HasanPiker/YouTube via Twitch
His followers send the 33-year-old comments which pop up on-screen. Sometimes, he’ll talk back.
His stream of the 2020 US presidential election results was the sixth most-watched source of all live election coverage across YouTube and Twitch, according to a StreamLabs report.
Piker was one of 200 political ‘influencers’ who were given credentials for the first time ever at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August, he’s had multiple members of Congress on his streams and has been invited by mainstream media to appear on their panels.
“He’s debating the moderator,” Piker shouts into his mic, watching the presidential debate, criticising Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. As the moderator resets the debate, Piker jokes: “Don’t help him you f—ken ass.”
If you’ve ever seen a YouTube reaction video, the style is similar. But now people like Piker are live reacting to things such as the DNC, the latest in Gaza, or sifting through news and giving you their take.
A streaming and podcast blitz from US candidates
Piker’s rise in popularity has helped carve an established corner of the internet for people to stream and talk politics and it’s got the attention of political parties.
“Those are big numbers,” Cory Alpert a former Biden-Harris administration official, now a PhD candidate in social and political sciences at the University of Melbourne, told The Feed.
“For people watching these young streamers, my hunch is that they’re not getting political information from anywhere else.”
While Piker has been repeatedly critical of Harris, particularly her response to the Hamas-Israel war, he is one of the political influencers who skews left.
This could mobilise casual viewers enough to get out and vote in the United States where voting isn’t mandatory, Alpert said.
“If these are reaching people in the suburbs and they end up changing 10,000 minds, that very well could be the difference in one state.”
Social media influencers were invited to make content during the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Source: Getty / Kevin Dietsch
As younger voters increasingly turn to social media and other non-traditional media for news (as detailed in the Reuters Institute report) the format allows for lengthy spans of screen time (Piker’s 2020 election stream ran for 16 hours) that short videos on TikTok and Instagram don’t.
And US election candidates know it too. They too are streaming on the sites and even jumping on themselves.
Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday streamed themselves to the platform playing an American football video game against each other as they campaigned for the Democrats.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tim Walz stream themselves playing Madden against each other while they campaign for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Credit: Twitch
In August, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on the Kick stream of 23-year-old Adin Ross (Ross was booted off Twitch for using slurs) and gifted him a Tesla and a Rolex.
“There’s a lot of people that are first-time voters watching today and I want to make it very clear to everybody that you’re a human being, you’re a great human being,” Ross said of Trump in the stream.
On the night of the Harris-Trump debate, the video platform Rumble, which tends to be more popular with the right, broke records for concurrent viewership, with more than one million people watching various streams, according to a news release from the platform.
Republican candidate Donald Trump and popular influencer Adin Ross appeared together in a one-hour Kick stream to encourage first-time voters to vote for Trump.
Guy Cohen a progressive streamer on Twitch who goes by the onscreen name I’mreallyimportant told The Feed the appeal of political streams is in their authenticity, casualness and their breakdown of who’s who in politics.
On the day he speaks to the Feed he rattles off his agenda for the day: “Today, Tim Walz, the VP candidate called Elon Musk a dipshit, so I’ll talk about that on stream. And Kamala Harris announced that she’s going to Texas on Friday and Texas is quite red (a state where more voters tend to vote Republican). There’s not really any purpose to go there, so we’ll talk about that and I’ll watch rallies or I’ll try to pick a couple of clips.”
A few thousand people could join one of his streams. Some might ask questions, and he will try to explain.
“There’s a bond. Watching the news by yourself is boring. It’s much more fun to do it with a bunch of friends,” he said.
Guy Cohen or I’mreallyimportant, says part of streaming is about giving viewers literacy about how politics even works. Credit: Twitch/I’mreallyimportant
“They want to learn about you and they want to share things about themselves with you too. So there’s a lot of trust there.”
But it’d never work without the irreverent approach of most streamers, he said. “I tell people about who the people are and who they hate and ‘Oh, wait until this guy speaks, he’s going to bring this up’,” he said. “So I bring out the drama in it”.
This is also part of its undoing, Cohen says. Theatrics can overtake the desire to be fair on the topic, he believes.
“We’re seeing people really taking in one side and not pursuing any other research or they’re only getting their news from this one source.”
Cory Alpert says even if the information isn’t always right, parts of the public look to streamers like they’re media. He says the landscape lends itself more to Trump’s character but whether Democratic candidate Kamala Harris likes it or not, she has to engage with the sometimes unreliable commentators.
“The cat’s out of the bag a little bit when you have millions of people tuning into any of these non-traditional outlets,” he said.
“They have to spend their time engaging because if you don’t, then you’ve just given up on talking to half the American population.”
Dr Rodney Taveira, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre, said ignoring gaming-turned-general-streaming platforms would be to ignore a whole wave of new voters.
“This is not something that is just a part of the 2024 American election cycle. It’s here to stay in the US and therefore will be here to stay around the world.”
And he says the same of podcasters and YouTubers. In the final weeks of campaigning, both campaigns are embarking on a podcast and YouTube blitz.
Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast — which has a big female audience, and Trump’s podcast streamer lineup included YouTube pranksters The Nelk Boys, influencer Logan Paul, political commentator Patrick Bet-David and most recently a three-hour unedited podcast with Joe Rogan. Each pulled millions of views.
“It’ll be something that political campaigns will be increasingly turning their attention to, particularly after this one, to work out what the effect was.”
Taveira says the trend isn’t one that necessarily boosts Harris when streaming platforms skew male and “younger men are increasingly skewing conservative over time”.
“I’d say this is why Donald Trump has gone on more streams than has Kamala Harris. There’s simply more space for him to take up on the streams,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know where to have Kamala Harris appear.”
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