Understanding Political Communication and Political Communicators on Twitch

TL;DR

This study investigates how Twitch, a live streaming platform, is used for political communication by identifying political streamers, analyzing content categories, and examining audience interaction patterns, highlighting its influence on younger demographics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology combining API data, machine learning, and network analysis to study political communication on Twitch, revealing content themes and interaction dynamics.

Findings

Identified 574 political streamers on Twitch.

Revealed seven broad categories of political topics.

Found that a small number of users dominate interactions.

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 streamers. I used topic modeling to analyze the content of political streams, revealing seven broad categories of political topics and a unique pattern of communication involving context-specific ``emotes.'' Additionally, I created user-reference networks to examine interaction patterns, finding that a small number of users dominate the communication network. This research contributes to our understanding of how new social media technologies influence political communication, particularly among younger audiences.