The Futility of the Twitch Political Community

Two years ago, or a lifetime on Twitch, you would be hard pressed to find a streamer hosting a panel discussion on US Politics. Today, there are literally dozens of 6-viewer-Andy streamers who congregate daily to blather on about issues that they don’t understand and probably don’t care enough about to do anything about outside of larping as a concerned citizen on the internet.

What is even worse is that most of these conversations devolve into shouting matches, or are even designed to get individual streamers to fight each other on particular topics. Some streamers seek these drama spats day after day to increase their following and perpetually breed hate and drama on a platform that already has enough of both.

A BNN analysis of these Twitch political panels has revealed some alarming statistics. Our writers and volunteers have meticulously combed through 2000+ hours of footage and clips over the past three weeks in order to cultivate this alarming data. Let’s dive into the key findings. The panels surveyed are hosted by Mindwaves, Leon Seifers, Freemz, and Tree of Logic. A handful of other infrequent panels were also analyzed and included in the overall numbers.

• In terms of raw numbers, a whopping 17% of the viewers were common among all of the panels studied, indicating that the very same people are consuming the same mindless content week after week, often many days in a row.
• Viewership is on average 34% higher when drama is intentionally manufactured, indicating that the majority of the appeal of these conversations is counter-productive drama.
• The average concurrent viewership of ALL streamers who attended at least three panels during the analysis time frame is a measly 7 concurrent viewers, indicating that these panels are mostly an attempt to con viewers into following small channels.
• Of all of the panels surveyed, absolutely none of them ever brought on a subject matter expert to discuss the issues.

Combing through this footage elucidated some fairly obvious facts about the streamers themselves, namely that these people pontificating on very serious issues are not themselves very serious people. Only a handful of the people brave enough to spout nonsense on a 60-viewer stream had the same courage to be politically active in their home communities.

In short, the Bernie or Busters who are now crying on every political panel possible are the same people who didn’t make any personal sacrifices to get their own candidate elected. Sad! We hope to see more activism and less drivel from the Twitch political community, but we’re not counting on it.

-Gohndim