Understanding political communication and political communicators on Twitch

by Sangyeon Kim

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.