Understanding political communication and political communicators on Twitch.

ABSTRACT: As new technologies rapidly reshape patterns of political communication, platforms like Twitch are transforming how people consume political information. This entertainment-oriented live streaming platform allows us to observe the impact of technologies such as "live-streaming" and "streaming-chat" on political communication. Despite its entertainment focus, Twitch hosts a variety of political actors, including politicians and pundits. This study explores Twitch politics by addressing three main questions: 1) Who are the political Twitch streamers? 2) What content is covered in political streams? 3) How do audiences of political streams interact with each other? To identify political streamers, I leveraged the Twitch API and supervised machine-learning techniques, identifying 574 political

SUBMITTER: Kim S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11602016 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature