Although Donald Trump seeks to contest the results of the 2020 US presidential election following a narrow loss to Presdient-Elect Joe Biden, Twitch streamers celebrated the sitting president's electoral and popular loss with others online. The culmination of four years of anti-Trump sentiment and a harrowing, weeklong election, social media platforms have erupted in celebration (and quick calls for civility and unity), and gaming celebrities on Twitch joined in by sharing their thoughts on the historic moment.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have had some rough patches with Twitch. The streaming site suspended Trump's channel in June for hate speech, which only further sparked his fight against select social media sites this year. Before this, Trump claimed that social media was censoring him and his campaign when Twitter flagged one of his tweets with a fact-checking tag, which they platform has gone on to do consistently in recent days during the long ballot-counting process. The initial incident incited a proposed executive order attempting to regulate social media threats by Trump that he would see Twitter shut down. Later, a video posted on Twitter by the Trump campaign was taken down due to copyright issues, which the president and his campaign referred to as censorship. While Trump's social media feuds have been going on for some time, Biden also recently found himself at odds with Twitch and its viewers when his channel's moderators banned anyone who spoke about war crimes from the chat.
Luckily, Trump's fight with Twitter wasn't successful, so several top Twitch streamers were able to tweet their celebrations of Joe Biden's election win over the weekend. AustinShow host and streamer Austin tweeted to Trump letting him know that "t's the end of the road" for his presidency, telling him to shout out his channel on the way out in true streamer fashion. Streamer HasanAbi cheered for Biden's win as he very enthusiastically (see: in all-caps) wrote that all the major U.S. news sites had reported the results and that he was ready to call it a win for Biden. Pokimane also hilariously applauded the victory over Trump by joking that he had been voted out of the airlock, referring to the recent hit indie Among Us, where the aim is to kick deadly Impostor players out into the cold reaches of space in order to survive and win.
Twitch has become a place to engage with almost any topic, and as the election drew near this year, politics became the central talking point on a lot of channels - even those that are usually devoted to gaming. Even politicians, themselves, are beginning to use Twitch as a platform by which they extend their campaigns' reach and influence young voters. Leading up to the election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even made Twitch history playing Among Us with popular streamers including Pokimane and HasanAbi to promote progressive values and get out the vote, which may have made a huge difference in this year's high-turnout race.
Many in real life and on social media have no doubt breathed a sigh of relief now that the US elections are over and Biden will be taking one-term President Trump's place as the nation's 46th President. As Twitch continues to grow in audience size and importance, its streaming personalities will become more and more influential not just in areas of pop culture, but politics and other serious real-word arenas. They should accordingly continue to wield that social power with care and great responsibility.
Source: Austin, HasanAbi, Pokimane
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