Why Live Streamers are Politically Insane

A theory of how live streamers go crazy

Two days ago, Asmongold was banned for saying he doesn’t care if every Palestinian dies. That’s an insane, cruel thing to say - but why does this keep happening to Twitch streamers in particular?

Let’s back up. Asmongold, real name Zack Hoyt, is a prominent personality on the live streaming platform Twitch. He has millions of followers across his two Twitch channels, a YouTube account with 3 million followers, and a dedicated fan subreddit with 400,000 subscribers. Asmongold is… a weird dude. He’s a variety streamer, which in plain English means he plays a wide variety of video games, does reaction videos, talks about all kinds of stuff, and generally does whatever the Twitch ‘meta’ is at the moment. He’s best known for living in filthy conditions, which at one point got so bad that roaches were crawling over him on-stream. He does not seem like a very smart guy or even all that mentally stable, but despite that he sure does have a large audience!

Somehow, he ended up on the topic of Israel/Palestine last week and let loose this unhinged rant:

The most notable thing about Asmongold’s rant is that it sadly isn’t all that notable for a Twitch personality. Livestreamers, almost more than any other type of influencer, are political crackpots. Even the ones who gain fame via normal channels like playing video games routinely engage in insane political rants. Hasan Piker is one of the most successful livestreamers of the last decade and a big enough star to be profiled in national media, and his roster of political opinions includes playing (supportively) terrorist propaganda live on stream, comparing Houthis to Anne Frank, endorsing rape, and suggesting viewers should kill a US Senator. Streamers like Adin Ross, Destiny, and more routinely take horrifying, extreme, insane, or just incredibly bizarre political stances.

This kind of thing could theoretically happen anywhere on the internet, but it happens with much higher intensity in the livestreaming world. You don’t see the biggest accounts on Instagram endorsing terrorism or getting into massive dramatic political fights. The livestream drama subreddit, /r/LiveStreamFail, has 3.4 million members, while /r/TikTokDrama has a mere nine thousand. Among the influencer set, livestreamers are uniquely insane.¹ Why?

I don’t think it’s an accident. Livestreaming is very different from other kinds of content creation, and there are structural reasons why so many live streamers eventually go insane.

Live Content vs. Curated Content

Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first. Live streaming is live. It’s an impromptu, unscripted form of content and that leads to a lot more gaffes. YouTubers, TikTokkers, and Instagram influencers all plan out the vast majority of their content. They write a script. They only upload once they’ve spent a lot of time editing, tweaking, and perfecting their work.

Live streamers aren’t like that. They almost always have a plan for what they’re going to stream about, but once they go live it’s an unpredictable format. If something political comes up, they can’t take an hour to consider their position. They don’t have time to write a script. They can’t do a dozen takes to make sure their words are carefully chosen. They do it live, and this leads to a lot of insane things being said.

Sheer Volume

If you want to really understand livestreamers, you have to understand the nature of what they do. Being a Twitch personality is radically different than being an influencer on any other platform. The biggest difference is that live streamers are putting hundreds of times more material out into the world than anyone else.

A typical YouTuber might release 1-2 videos a week. Maybe those videos are 15 minutes each. Half an hour of content per week - and that’s not a bad work rate for a YouTuber. By contrast, Hasan Piker in 2023 streamed 7 hours per day. That metric includes vacations - in reality he streamed more like 9-10 hours per day, with a very rare day off. That’s almost 50 hours of content every single week with no breaks - and among popular streamers, that’s not unusual.

When you have that sheer volume of material going out into the world, the odds that you say something deranged increases significantly.

So. Many. Hours.

The other thing you really need to understand about the live streaming schedule is that every streamer doing these kind of hours is desperate to fill the time.

I cannot stress enough how tedious and difficult it can be to sit in front of a virtual audience for ten consecutive hours and talk the entire time. And not just talk - be interesting, funny, witty, provocative, attention getting. Most streamers with large audiences are streaming 6-10 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. And I’m telling you, as someone who’s dabbled in live streaming myself, you just run out of things to say. Nobody, nobody, nobody can be interesting for that long, that consistently, day in and day out.

Live streamers are desperate for something, anything to fill those hours. That’s why so much of livestreaming is built around things like playing video games, watching movies or documentaries, reading chat out loud, or react content (reacting to news stories, movie trailers, or clips from other streamers). Those things can be entertaining and eat the hours. That’s time when you don’t have to do the talking, you can sit and watch. You can just react to whatever’s in front of you without having to think too hard. Your life, as a live streamer, is a bottomless pit you must continually fill with content, never ending content. Once you realize that filling the hours is the central challenge of livestreaming, things begin to fall into place.

This is part of the reason streamers get into trouble. Because there’s so much time to fill, they inevitable end up talking about what’s in the news or what’s hot politically, even if talking politics isn’t what they normally do. They might know very little about the subject, but end up spouting an opinion anyway. There are so many hours to fill. With so many hours and so much desperation for something to talk about, of course they end up with idiotic hot takes.

React Content

‘React’ style content is another surefire way to fill time. With so many hours and so many streamers, it’s very easy to find the worst two minute clip from a week of streaming and use it for react content on your channel. Your chat will often find these things for you and send them them to you. Streamer vs streamer political fights are a great way to eat up the hours, and they’re also great for engagement for all parties involved. Drama sells.

These fights are also circular - one left leaning streamer says something questionable. A right-leaning streamer reacts to the clip and slams them, generating a new piece of content, a new clip. A third streamer reacts to both, staking a middle ground. The left leaning streamer gets word that these new reactions exist and reacts to the reaction, and around and around the wheel continues to turn.

All of these areas are important, but I actually think they’re not the most important factor. If I had to pick one central reason why live streamers go insane, I would blame chat.

Live Chat, Audience Capture and Parasociality

On virtually every live streaming platform, viewers can participate in a live chat while the stream is ongoing. Live chatting is central to the experience of watching a live streamer. Many streamers even superimpose chat live on the stream, so even non-chatters are getting a live view of what the collective chat is saying.

This chat experience is incredibly interactive, and this changes the experience in profound ways. Streamers almost always monitor chat while they stream, and will often respond to chat sentiment or even to individual messages. You, as a mere chat participant, can actively influence what’s happening on stream - in real time! If you really want to influence the stream, you can pay to use the common ‘text to speech’ tool and have your message read to everyone watching.

Audience capture is the problem of an influencer chasing the approval of their audience and becoming a more extreme, more parodic version of themselves. This happens as a sort of feedback loop. A content creator gets a positive response to a certain kind of material and ends up creating more and more of that material, even if it doesn’t reflect what they originally wanted to do or what they believe. This happens in every medium, but the process is turbocharged on live streams. There’s no other form of social media where the creator-audience feedback loop is so instantaneous. In real time, streamers will be egged on by their audiences to say more of the stuff they want. In real time, streamers can see what gets a strong reaction and what doesn’t. That feedback loop could take weeks or months on other platforms, but it takes mere minutes on Twitch.

On a similar level, parasocial bonds form much faster through live streaming than with any other form of influencer. An Instagram model with millions of followers will never notice you. A YouTube or TikTok creator with millions of followers is never going to personally respond to your comment. But even the largest accounts on Twitch are fairly easy to interact with. They talk to their chats all the time. You can pay for talk to text, you can buy a paid subscription and get personally thanked. And of course, there’s far more content for you to keep consuming - they are always, always live. And because these factors lead to much strong parasocial bonds, streamers and audiences end up deeper in ideological bubbles than they otherwise would.

Are live streamers just d*mb?

There’s one other factor we really have to touch on. I promise I’m not trying to be mean here. But if you watch some of these streamers for long enough, you will inevitably find yourself asking a question. Are they just kind of dumb?

You don’t have to be a genius to be a social media influencer or a content creator. There are plenty of stupid YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc. But while I won’t claim you need to be smart to succeed on those platforms, they do select for a certain kind of thoughtfulness. You need to be producing something people want, you typically need a theory of why your content will work. You need to be obsessive about what you’re producing. Even the schlock that MrBeast produces has an incredible amount of theory behind it - every single cut, every single graphic in a MrBeast video is hyper-analyzed. Social media success does require skill and thought.

I would argue that live streaming selects for something very different than other forms of influencing. For the most part, it does not require the same level of thoughtfulness. It does not require as much theory and refined skill. What you mostly need to become a successful livestreamer is effort - if you stream constantly, your audience will grow. There are very few people willing to stream 50 hours a week, every week, without breaks or vacations. Success in live streaming is more a function of grind than of intelligence, over quantity over quality, of reactive entertainment over sophistication. And because of that, the very biggest live streamers might just be dumber than other kinds of influencers.

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All of this raises the deeper question of why we listen to people like this in the first place? Why do we care what Twitch streamers or TikTok influencers or Instagram girlies think about Israel/Palestine in the first place? For that matter, why do we care what Taylor Swift or Chappell Roan or any celebrity thinks? There’s obviously the meta-narrative of “I care what they think because they are influential and could make a difference”, but that merely pushes the question towards why their fans would care.

We’re not going to answer that gigantic question in this post, and even if we could understand it we’re not going to change that aspect of parasocial relationships any time soon. But as I often say, even if we can’t solve the problem, we should at least understand it. In no other category of social media are there so many dramatic political fights, so many supposedly non-political personalities getting into political hot water, so many frankly insane rants that come seemingly out of nowhere. Livestreaming is fundamentally different than other forms of social media, so don’t be surprised the next time you see a streamer suggesting we need to kill all puppies or put all middle managers in a gulag.

1. The one thing I’m leaving out of this post is Twitter. Twitter has a lot of insane political posters, but it almost functions as a sort of politics-containment-zone where people who are political weirdos in real life flock to do battle. Twitch and livestreaming is different in that non-political audiences and non-political creators still end up with political rants and in political drama.