The streaming platform Twitch is most often used by gamers to broadcast live video game competitions and interact with fans. But it’s also home to a growing number of users who are posting news content. Researchers recently looked at how three outlets — the Washington Post, a left-leaning political commentator and a right-wing media channel — use the platform. While creating opportunities to build rapport with audiences, Twitch’s interactive features also break many of the journalistic norms intended to preserve editorial independence.
Maxwell Foxman is an assistant professor of media studies and game studies at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. He co-authored the study and joins us to talk more about the pros and cons of using Twitch to produce and consume news content.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Twitch is one of the most visited websites in the world. It’s mainly a livestreaming platform for gamers and their fans, but it is also home to a growing number of people posting news content, hours-long fire hoses of real-time response. Maxwell Foxman has been researching this trend. He is an assistant professor of media studies and game studies in the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. He co-authored a recent study looking into Twitch, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Maxwell Foxman: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: How did you first get interested in studying this intersection of Twitch and news?
Foxman: I’ve been studying this intersection of games and news for a long time. It started really in the 2010′s, looking at how news outlets were utilizing games and game-based platforms for a variety of purposes, mostly looking at what are called news games. I got interested in Twitch because it really is a very useful platform for conveying information live, and the streamers and content creators on it are making a lot of content and having full-time jobs with relatively small teams. I got interested in it, frankly, because I thought it could be advantageous to journalists to do hyperlocal news. But over time, myself and my co-authors Brandon Harris and William Partin, started looking at Twitch and seeing what was actually happening on there.
Perhaps one of the quintessential moments for us, in terms of our research, came on January 6th, when our friends were actually pointing us towards livestreams from people like Hasan Piker of the riots that were happening in the capital, rather than telling us to go to CNN or to go to other traditional news outlets. Between this long, ongoing interest in how games can be used to tell journalistic stories, and more recent events like those Capitol riots, my interest has been piqued for the last few years.
Miller: I want to hear more about Piker and January 6th, but just for folks who have never seen Twitch, can you describe what it looks like?
Foxman: Sure. So, Twitch looks a lot like other livestreaming video services. If you’re not familiar with that, perhaps, either YouTube and its livestreaming services, or TikTok also has a similar livestreaming service, Facebook also has some of these livestreaming video capabilities – it mostly consists of a video. That video is accompanied by a few very standard things that you see on most social media platforms; you can share, subscribe, or follow channels. Perhaps the most unique feature in terms of the culture of Twitch is the chat, which is a text chat that runs alongside whatever is streaming, but is incredibly active. The people that are on it, whether it’s a few dozen people or hundreds or thousands of people, will be constantly writing in this chat.
What Twitch is mostly used for is to livestream people playing video game content, and that usually consists of hours-long play with a streamer who is usually superimposed over the video content they’re playing, playing and commenting both on what they’re playing and the chat. It’s that sort of combination of things, the live repartee between the streamer and the chat, and then the video game play that the streamer is doing, that has become the hallmarks of this particular platform.
Miller: How did a site that’s primarily a platform for livestreaming gaming and gamers become a place where some people seek out information about what’s happening in the world?
Foxman: What’s ironic is that Twitch actually began as an offshoot of an older livestreaming service called Justin.tv, which has this long, complicated history with both social media and journalism. People might remember Justin.tv as being one of the livestreaming sites actually used during Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy protests that were happening in 2011. It was a place that was supposed to be just about the streaming of everyone’s everyday activities. But Twitch was the most successful part of Justin.tv. – which actually folded – because people really enjoy watching other people game. It is an incredibly popular phenomenon, particularly amongst millennials and Gen Z.
I think the reason, frankly, why people are turning towards it for news consumption has to do with that hours-long nature of the streams that I just described. Many people that stream will stream for four, five, six hours at a time, longer than most radio shows, and as they’re streaming, they just talk. It is a very natural place to have conversations of all sorts. So people like Piker started off mostly gaming and then would just include some political commentary as part of their overall agenda for the day. For those that like his personality and like similar gaming personalities – this is a very personality-oriented platform – it becomes a really vibrant and interesting way to get news from someone who maybe you trust, maybe you feel an affinity towards, and certainly who you’re entertained by.
Miller: What was Twitch like on January 6th?
Foxman: It was a really visceral memory for me because I remember watching it and communicating with some of my friends over another gaming platform, Discord, at the time. For someone like Piker, what was interesting is he has a very distinct style that, in the paper, we call less of a kind of gatekeeper role, and more of a navigator. He was pulling content live as the events were occurring from a variety of existing news sites; we were seeing live streams from the likes of CNN, social media posts, live video from Twitter. And he was pulling it together and essentially organizing it in response to what the chat was saying. Some of the people in the chat were asking questions, others were egging him on. He was quite raucous about it. That’s one of the things that’s sort of quintessential about Piker’s style; he has a very unapologetic, bombastic style, and he was really just leaning into that. It was such an interesting and complicated and emotional reporting of it, in a manner that, as I said, I just did not see across other types of news outlets that day.
Miller: One of the things that seems to me that’s novel about Twitch in the context of journalism is the time frame of it. Viewers, or watchers, they get to see somebody processing events often in real time. Certainly, in terms of January 6th, that’s the way it was. It’s like a never ending hot take, which is the essential feature of this site.
But that seems really different from the standard ethos of journalism, where you take a little bit of time, ideally, to sift through what happened, to make sure that you’re going to portray it accurately, and then to provide some kind of theoretically unbiased assessment. This is all just responding in the moment immediately into what’s happened. How does the medium itself, in your mind, affect the way journalism can operate?
Foxman: This is actually the quintessential finding of our paper, and I’m very glad that you brought it up as a consequence. Essentially, we argue that there is a new form of liveness that is really fostered by Twitch and similar platforms, and that liveness gets at the heart of what you just described. It’s not the sort of liveness that is often associated with journalism, which is often event-based, getting to an event and covering that event live, often dispassionately. Instead, the liveness is co-created – that’s some of the language we use – between the audience and the streamer, the content creator. It’s interesting precisely because of the fact that it is co-created, that this is not something that is happening outside, without the audience taking a role. Instead, the streamer really is trying to both convey information to their audience, is unapologetic often about their own worldview. And the audience, both economically in terms of eyeballs and views, in terms of response in the chat, feeds into that and is able to contribute themselves.
In an era where social media and text-based news and information conveyance is so interested in metrics and engagement, this actually provides a very different type of relationship between how audiences can engage with news, how they develop relationship with newsmakers, and again, one of those quintessential hallmarks of journalism, how they develop trust. I think in that sense, it’s an incredibly powerful tool both from the perspective of journalism, and then also from sort of affiliated journalistic professions like political commentating, which would be probably how Piker would identify himself as opposed to a traditional journalist.
Miller: It’s interesting you say that because, if you set aside the liveness, which is a huge piece … yesterday, I was watching him, (this was on Monday,) and he was going through an interview from Meet the Press (from the day before, from Sunday) where Senator Lindsey Graham was being interviewed. He would do something which I heard the late Rush Limbaugh do over and over, which is play part of an interview and then scream about it, or complain about it, either the answers, in this case, from a conservative senator, or the questions from the interviewer. He’d then go back to playing the interview and then stop it again. It was a classic combination of partisan attacks and media criticism that, in some ways, there are established models for that in radio talk shows. The liveness, though, really does seem different.
We’re talking about the possibilities for either building an audience, or building trust with the audience, in new ways for legacy journalistic outlets. How many of them have actually experimented with Twitch?
Foxman: So the truth is we couldn’t find that many. It’s not to say that you don’t see traditional media outlets on Twitch, but specifically, when it comes to journalism, it’s been pretty rare. In the US, we focus specifically on the Washington Post, which has had a presence on Twitch on and off over the last few years, while also experimenting with a number of other livestream platforms. I think they’re currently using YouTube a little bit more than Twitch. You can also see Sky News on there. And then there are a handful of other types of media outlets which, again, for a variety of reasons, including licensing, will appear on there. The NWSL, the National Women’s Soccer League, used to have their streams on Twitch. You can also see things like Korean baseball, other things like that, but it’s not that many, and we really focused in on the Washington Post because it was one of the exclusive news outlets that was producing content on Twitch.
Miller: What stood out to you in the way the Washington Post used Twitch? And what was different about the way they did it compared to, say, a left-leaning political commentator like Hasan Piker, or right wing sites that have sort of a similar basic idea?
Foxman: The Washington Post, as you might expect, treated Twitch much more traditionally than Piker or the other outlet we looked at from the far right, called Patriot Soapbox. With the Washington Post, we found that to a large degree, many of their posts looked a little bit like C-SPAN. There’s a lot of agnostic coverage without commentary of congressional hearings, things like that. They did have some talk show style streams at some point, but they were a little bit more rare. And they had a couple of more unusual streams, and actually their most popular, had to do with things like “Playing Games with Politicians,” where they had people like Matt Gaetz sit down and play Madden with one of their journalists and answer questions while they were playing.
That was closer to what you would traditionally see on Twitch anyway. What was really interesting is they disaggregated their video from much of the chat, and that perhaps was again more traditional than what you would see from other streamers. There would just be another journalist, most often Gene Park, who would be commenting in the chat. He would be sort of off to the side, while other journalists would be speaking into the camera, so to speak. That was one way that it was quite different, and very different from someone like Piker who, as I’ve suggested, has had this really live generative conversation with the chat while he’s posting, and also was remixing and remediating content, as opposed to the original content which Washington Post most often focused on.
And you saw a similar relationship with audiences in Patriot Soapbox, which really modeled itself as a 24/7 news network that mostly trafficked in things like QAnon conspiracy theories. In order to keep that 24/7 news outlet component going, [they] would actually do things like get viewers to be commentators if they were responsive enough, because when you’re trying to keep a 24-hour news network going in a small platform like Twitch, you need as many people on deck as you can. I should also note that, eventually, Twitch did ban Patriot Soapbox, though it does exist on other platforms to this day I believe, like DLive.
Miller: Banned them because of incendiary content they are posting?
Foxman: Yes, for violating their terms of service. I should also add that all three channels that we looked at mostly carefully fit into those terms of service or were aware of those terms of service until again, PSB eventually did violate them and was banned as a consequence.
Miller: How much of mainstream media, or legacy media, how much of the trepidation on the part of newspapers or TV outlets do you think is about a lack of control? A fear that if they actually use Twitch, the way left wing or right wing commentators might, that the only way to do that is to give up the tight hand of control that makes their brands what they are?
Foxman: Well, I think it’s complicated. There are two reasons, perhaps, for the trepidation you’re describing. The first is there’s a long-standing, complicated relationship between news publishers and platforms that I think causes trepidation for onboarding onto new platforms in general. There’s research that goes back now at least 10 years about the costs of, for instance, creating content on platforms like Snapchat, that it cost companies the equivalent of an entire TV newsroom or broadcast studio to make that content, and often did not come with monetary rewards. It’s a huge investment, and a huge gamble, that only the companies with the ability to invest in that can invest.
I think the second reason for trepidation might be a little bit more cultural; in other research I’ve done, I interviewed mostly print journalists actually, about why they aren’t using platforms like Twitch or other virtual world spaces, and one of them told me flat out that they just didn’t want to be an entertainer, that they thought that the everyday goings on of their work was, frankly, maybe a little bit boring to watch on a livestream for hours. More than that, they saw that as a different occupation and a different skill. In some ways, thinking or maybe even rethinking the relationship between journalists and this kind of entertainer role is necessary in order for legacy outlets to embrace platforms like Twitch, and you do see examples of it happening. Probably one of the most notable examples for me is David Jorgenson, who is known as the Washington Post’s TikTok guru to some degree. I believe he’s even written a book about it. He really does seamlessly blend that kind of entertainer role on the video platform, TikTok, with a very serious or very useful reporting.
Miller: Maxwell Foxman, thanks very much.
Foxman: Thank you.
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