The thread where everyone in it hates streamers sponsored by DavidCroquet

[benji]

Told through the diverse and fascinating careers of nine streamers, this is a “timely and insightful dive into the players and politics of one of the twenty-first century’s most influential modes of media” (Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine), examining how Twitch has revolutionized technology, entertainment, business, and pop culture.

With 2.5 million viewers at any given moment, the streaming platform Twitch is in the lead and often well beyond mainstream networks like CNN and Fox during primetime. On Twitch, the Amazon-owned tech behemoth, the biggest personalities, like Kai Cenat, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, and Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, can earn millions per year by firing up their internet connection and going live.

Veteran technology and gaming journalist Nathan Grayson “captures the multitudes contained within Twitch while offering a captivating window into content creators’ lives” (Publishers Weekly), especially those who helped make the platform into a billion-dollar global business. From Twitch’s early days of rapid growth to acquisition by Amazon to the defection of creators and rival platforms, Grayson makes the radical argument that many social technology companies are far more dependent on their creators than the creators are on their platforms.

Told through nine exceptional Twitch creators whose on-screen personalities helped the company grow into a powerhouse, this is the explosive and “necessary” (Mark Bergen, author of Like, Comment, Subscribe) story of when entertainment meets the internet in the era of social and video content domination.

Within this "timely" and "necessary" book is a call for the government to better police and suppress speech on the internet:

Even taking into account the #DropKiwiFarms campaign’s success, we’re left with a question: Was it worth the cost? Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor of criminology in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, does not think these sorts of public campaigns are a sustainable means by which to contain the internet’s most virulent ills. Kiwi Farms—like 8chan and the Daily Stormer before it—managed to operate for years sans intervention, causing unquantifiable harm in the process. Moreover, when it came time to confront the beast dwelling in the internet’s basement, the responsibility fell to its victims.

“There can be a good outcome: At least Cloudflare acted in the end,” said Tusikov, who’s written multiple pieces about the relationship between online hate and the structural forces that quietly enable it. “But it could have very easily ignored [the #DropKiwiFarms campaign] and just kind of ridden this out. And then what happens? There’s this kind of small, ragtag group of people who, along with their other jobs and staying safe and producing content and feeding their families, also have to fight for their safety and lives.”

Tusikov pointed to the way this situation echoed back to discoveries made by activists about PayPal, Airbnb, and other companies in the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the death of a woman named Heather Heyer.

“It was revealed that many of the tech companies were pretty happy to take white supremacist money as long as they didn’t suffer reputational damage,” Tusikov said. “[For them] it was worth it when no one cared, but now it’s no longer worth it.”

The internet’s history, she believes, is a natural origin point for this troubling dynamic: “The United States government preferred a very private sector−led commercial approach,” she said. “You have early internet adopters and scholars and groups like the [Electronic Frontier Foundation] today taking very much a multi-stakeholder approach where the government should play a very light-touch role—that NGOs, especially American NGOs, and businesses should cooperate together.”

“But,” she continued, “what happens when companies themselves are the problem?”

Regulators, activists and online denizens have argued, must take a more prominent role in mitigating these issues.

“The answer to Kiwi Farms is not more speech, but… actually enforcing criminal laws against harassment and doxxing—and incitement to violence and death threats,” said Tusikov. “I think this is one of the things we see whenever there’s a move to regulate internet platforms: the fundamental conflicts between people who are arguing for a light touch, industry-led, civil society−led approach and people who argue that there needs to be more direct government intervention, even when that means government intervention into regulating speech.”

Other victims of Kiwi Farms agree that trying to blanket the flames of doxxing and harassment with more speech simply isn’t working. As an example [Erin] Reed offered up another entity that made headlines around the same time as Kiwi Farms: a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok, which regularly (and baselessly) characterized specific LGBTQ programs at schools, hospitals, and other locations as on-ramps into grooming and pedophilia. This, especially once the account’s posts gained traction within the right-wing news ecosystem, led to harassment and phoned-in threats at those locations, including bomb threats at Boston Children’s Hospital and Children’s National Hospital in Washington. On Twitter, however, Libs of TikTok persisted.

“I also think it’s important that tech companies be held accountable for actions committed on their platforms and for hate speech that thrives on their platforms,” said Reed. “The biggest example of this right now is Twitter itself with Elon Musk and how to treat accounts like Libs of TikTok that target LGBTQ people, hospitals, school administrators, etc., who receive violent bomb threats, death threats, and actual action…. We’ve seen some companies take a stand on this, but we’ve also seen some companies take a stand in the other direction—sites like Shopify have come out in favor of selling ‘groomer’ merchandise from Libs of TikTok, we’ve seen Elon Musk himself jump into Libs of TikTok’s comments and replies.”

With companies failing to consistently act in situations like these—despite real-world harm, in the cases of both Kiwi Farms and Libs of TikTok—it’s clear that the responsibility cannot lie solely in their hands. But despite calls for change, Reed has yet to come across evidence that regulatory bodies in the United States view it as a pressing concern.

“I’m worried that no action is going to be taken,” said Reed. “I’m worried that there aren’t going to be anti-doxxing measures proposed in legislatures. We haven’t seen much movement…. I haven’t seen much activism around it in terms of legislative lobbying or anything like that.”

Tusikov again believes that United States cultural norms hold stronger sway in this area than many of us realize. Germany, for example, enforces much stricter rules around how social media companies must moderate hate speech and threats, and even in Canada, as Tusikov explained, freedom of expression is a charter value—applied on a case-by-case basis—rather than “an absolute right.”

“When we talk about the internet and some of these norms that big US companies like Cloudflare take, they have a very US-style footprint in terms of their legal and technical understandings,” she said. “This conflicts with other preferences, like keeping people safe, respecting people’s privacy, or protecting people from hate speech.”

Gardner noted that despite a popular view of the internet informed by the First Amendment, specific elements of it are nonetheless heavily governed by laws—specifically, copyright laws and laws against sexually explicit conduct involving minors.

“All of us agree that there should be some type of regulation of speech on the internet,” she said. “This is why we have agencies that will investigate and prosecute sites that distribute child pornography…. I feel like arguing that there’s a slippery slope from [protecting trans and marginalized people] to some kind of internet surveillance state is nonsense. A slippery slope fallacy is not a reason to avoid protecting people who are being targeted with violence.”

Tusikov believes the rusty gears of government are turning slowly, but they are turning.

“The interest is at least higher now,” she said. “I think there’s greater sensitivity among public policymakers. That’s partly because, every few months, we’re wracked by scandals, whether it’s Nazis, whether it’s Kiwi Farms, whether it’s Twitter, or the implosion of cryptocurrency. We’re seeing how these tech platforms are precarious, that they are interconnected. And as they collapse or implode, they take important parts of society [with them].”

So get to it, President Trump, arrest all streamers now.