Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Twitch streamers have worked to unpack the crisis for the viewers in real time. The war’s coverage on Twitch is a new wrinkle in the international reporting of a war that is being viewed by millions on live streams, where the standards and format for sharing and discussing information on the conflict vary distinctly from traditional news outlets.
Piker, an unabashedly leftist broadcaster who has raised over $200,000 for Ukrainian relief funds, is Twitch’s premiere political pundit, regularly pulling over 70,000 simultaneous viewers since the conflict began late last month, adding up to millions of total viewers each day. Twitch, meanwhile, has averaged 2,830,000 concurrent viewers across the platform at any given moment in 2022 according to analytics site Twitch Tracker, putting its regular collective viewership above that of cable networks like CNN, which averaged 1,078,000 simultaneous viewers during prime time as of late 2021, according to Adweek. (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
Piker is hardly alone. A plethora of Twitch streamers have spent the past week and a half sifting through countless tweets, TikToks and reports from mainstream outlets in an effort to provide up-to-the-minute coverage of Europe’s biggest war since World War II. They do this in a time when TikTok, especially, has been used to disseminate vast quantities of both on-the-ground footage from Ukraine and misinformation, and when even mainstream news outlets struggle to separate signal from noise. Some Twitch streamers attempt to counter or question the narratives presented by mainstream news. Others seek to train their audiences, so they’re not so easy to mislead. Most just hope to cut through the clutter and gain a firm grasp on what’s happening during a time of unprecedented chaos — and in front of a massive live viewership. Streamers see their ability to do so while in direct conversation with their audiences as a unique strength.
“If you are watching CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc., and you disagree with a position or have a question, yelling at the TV does nothing,” said Dylan “DylanBurnsTV” Burns, 21, a Twitch streamer and former director of the Maryland branch of Mike Gravel’s 2020 presidential campaign. “But in my [Twitch] community, it’s the exact opposite. I will respond in real time. That is an important advantage if you want to change people’s minds.”
Piker and his contemporaries all adopt a similar format: From webcam windows in the bottom corner of their screens, they display Web browsers bristling with tabs, each leading to a tweet, video or news report. From there, they discuss the goings-on of the day and engage with their viewers in the live chat, where messages fly by at a million miles per hour. While the streamers rarely contribute original reporting, they curate the news (sometimes with the aid of notable guests, like Chelsea Manning) often for eight or more hours per day. Sometimes their conversations are constructive, with both streamers and viewers learning and scrutinizing new information in tandem. Other times they’re more antagonistic, with a streamer calling out a viewer who’s, say, spreading misinformation. It’s a casual, low-budget approach that stands in stark contrast to the sort of coverage into which mainstream news networks pump millions of dollars.
Fog of war
While streamers in the West are finding audiences for their aggregated coverage of the war, on-the-ground accounts in Ukraine are harder to find on Twitch than on the more mobile-oriented TikTok; in the past seven days, Ukrainian-language streams averaged just 358 concurrent viewers across all of Twitch, according to Twitch Tracker, though Ukrainian streamers also sometimes broadcast in Russian or English. Many, like Oleksander “Sanya” Bokuchava, a Ukrainian streamer and pro “Apex Legends” player for esports organization Natus Vincere, have given up on streaming for the time being.
“I left my home city of Kyiv to ensure my safety and left everything that I used for streaming there,” Bokuchava told The Post. “Right now I am sitting and looking at news all day, hoping that this invasion ends ASAP.”
Another, who goes by the handle Vexicrypt, said his city, which he declined to name citing safety concerns, is “somewhat safe” for now, but air raid sirens still regularly blare, and he’s too frightened and distracted to go live.
“What I’m thinking [about] the most is how all my problems are tiny compared to what is happening right now,” Vexicrypt said. “I was really passionate about growing my channel and community for so long, and it saddens my heart that I can’t do it anymore. But at least I’m alive.”
Western streamers have relied on other social media platforms, information their chats crowdsource and mainstream news sources for their coverage. While streamers lack the funding and manpower of mainstream networks, they’ve gained a speed advantage during a time when everybody — traditional news networks included — has their eyes glued to social media.
“I feel like a lot more of the media is relying on content from social media [relative to previous major conflicts],” said Michael “Mike from PA” Beyer, 37, a Twitch streamer and former Pennsylvania House of Representatives candidate. “So I might be able to get in front of network television on some of these sources, because I’m more connected to what’s viral and not.”
As an example, he pointed to a video of a Russian transport that ran out of fuel on the side of a highway, which he said appeared on some mainstream networks “a day or two” after he discovered it online last week, positioned by those networks as evidence that Russia is bogged down and struggling. Regardless of narratives extrapolated, it makes sense that such footage would take longer to appear on a mainstream network. CNN, for example, has a series of best practices for geolocating and verifying social media footage, allowing the network to ensure it’s not fake or old. These involve identifying landmarks, matching weather to forecasts and drawing on NASA’s active-fire data.
There are downsides to a platform-wide coverage approach that relies on an avalanche of information furiously curated by streamers and their audiences. For one, misinformation is inevitable. Beyer says he does his best to vet information before presenting it, but on occasions where that’s not possible — say, when news is breaking and chat is bringing it to his attention — he tries to provide as many disclaimers as possible.
“Anytime I present social media video, I only do so with extreme caveats about the legitimacy of it, as nonverified information,” Beyer said. “Sometimes it takes [an audience] to point out that something is fake, you know?”
But Burns cautioned that one person runs the show: the streamer. “Your chat might correct you later, or you may correct yourself later, but that is after the fact, possibly after the damage has been done,” Burns said. “And who is that streamer going to have to answer to for spreading misinformation?”
Last week, Twitch rolled out a new misinformation policy that prohibits “individuals or propaganda entities whose online presence is dedicated to disseminating misinformation with clear risks of real-world harm,” but which leaves room for “one off statements containing misinformation.” Russian state media, which did not previously have a presence on Twitch, is now officially a no-go under this new policy; streamers who only sometimes share unreliable information are in less danger of getting banned. This stands in contrast to YouTube, which targets misinformation less discriminately and has, as a result, suspended legitimate news sources that were reporting on misinformation rather than spreading it.
While streamers often work with volunteer chat moderators — and bigger ones, like Piker, are represented by talent agencies — they’re not networks or newsrooms. Sometimes, this redounds to their benefit. Streamers have readily admitted that they aren’t infallible or objective. Piker, for example, has taken no small amount of flak for repeatedly insisting Russia would not invade Ukraine during his February broadcasts. Then it happened. He went on to apologize and explain his reasoning.
“Didn’t think a regional power would act so irrationally,” Piker said on Twitter. “I’ve admitted my mistakes. I got things wrong. I hope Ukrainians are safe.”
Misconceptions and deceptions
Streamers like Beyer and Piker — both of whom previously worked for left-leaning online news shows, The Majority Report and The Young Turks, respectively — pride themselves on providing context rooted in anti-imperialist politics. Twitch’s audience demographics suggest such a stance perspective could resonate with viewers: 70 percent of Twitch viewers are between the ages of 16 and 34, according to Twitch’s official demographic statistics, and political streamers on the platform predominantly lean left. While both Beyer and Piker oppose Russia’s invasion, they have emphasized the U.S.’s role in paving a path toward the current conflict, as well as the U.S.’s history of invasions.
Beyer views it as his responsibility to convey skepticism of overarching narratives to his audience.
“Whenever I’ve watched Western, mostly American media, it’s very focused on perceptions of Russian failure. Because geopolitically, we want to see the Russian military fail,” Beyer said. “I feel like I’ve been editorially more responsible in a lot of ways than what’s gone on cable television.”
Referring to the social media post of the Russian truck, Beyer said “Maybe Russia is having this problem. But a couple days is not enough time to make those kind of pronouncements, and how much of that is just spin from intelligence services with a perspective being repeated uncritically?”
In a time of mass uncertainty and contradictory narratives, streamers see opportunities for teachable moments. If misinformation is inevitable, at the very least viewers can be taught — in real time — to look for its telltale signs. This approach can lead streamers into tricky territory. Last week, for instance, Burns plucked a viewer out of his text chat for an on-air voice discussion. It quickly became clear that this viewer was convinced of the Putin-endorsed notion that Ukraine had been covertly commandeered by Nazis.
Burns repeatedly stated that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and lost family members in World War II, that Ukraine’s far-right Svoboda party could only procure two percent of the vote in a recent election and that Ukraine’s far-right Azov regiment accounts for under 1,000 members of Ukraine’s total armed forces, which number in the hundreds of thousands. Even after nearly an hour of back and forth, the viewer remained unmoved. In that time, though, he was able to espouse numerous conspiracy theories to Burns’s audience of thousands of concurrent viewers.
Still, Burns believes that in a time when misinformation lurks around every corner, tackling it head on makes more sense than trying to cover it up.
“I think one of the best ways to smash these misconceptions is to challenge someone who actually believes them,” Burns said. “You are showing your audience that you are confident in your ideas and that the facts are on your side. It also means that next time anyone who saw that live debunking hears one of these fallacious points, they will have the tools to deconstruct it themselves and hopefully change minds.”
Twitch says it enforces its policies not only against streamers, but also against chatters, who regularly spread misinformation far less visibly than streamers. Nonetheless, it remains relatively easy to find misinformation related to Russia and Ukraine in the chats of some channels covering the conflict. A Twitch spokesperson told The Post there are “very low levels of harmful misinformation behavior” on the platform and that recent policy changes are meant to prevent misinformation from growing into a more significant threat. In pursuit of this, the company has partnered with over a dozen experts, including the Global Disinformation Index, to evaluate who stays and who gets the boot. So far, this effort has impacted fewer than 100 accounts, including some linked to conspiracy movements like QAnon.
Global Disinformation Index co-founder and executive director Dr. Daniel Rogers acknowledged the difficulties Twitch faces.
“GDI has long argued that de-amplification and demonetization are the most effective tools to combat disinformation actors,” Rogers said. “Content moderation in environments like chat or comments is challenging given the speed and scale with which new content is generated.” While GDI leaves actual moderation to Twitch, Rogers said his organization monitors misinformation-related activity on other platforms, which allows Twitch to head bad actors off at the pass.
But misinformation thrives on time and repetition; If it can slip through smaller cracks in a platform’s foundation for long enough, its narratives can eventually take hold more broadly. Speaking to The Atlantic, Mike Caulfield, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, pointed to the way conspiratorial narratives surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection — some of which surfaced in fringe circles almost immediately — only really took hold after media scrutiny of the event died down.
“I do worry, when the attention isn’t so intense, there could be more attempts to muddle the narrative [surrounding Ukraine],” Caulfield told The Atlantic.
Twitch does not allow videos of graphic real-world violence for the purposes of news coverage. Streamers believe that as more and more viewers come to Twitch to follow current events, that will need to change.
“This is extremely frustrating because I believe war coverage should include detailed footage of the war in question,” said Burns, who recently received his first-ever warning from Twitch for depicting violence on stream. “People should be able to see the full extent of the horror Putin’s government has unleashed on Ukraine.”
Even as somebody who relies on Twitch as a means of covering major world events, Burns recognizes the platform’s problems. He recommends that those looking for answers keep all available options in mind.
“People should not just look to streamers or YouTubers for news,” he said. “That is an absolutely godawful idea. Do not trust me, or any of my contemporaries, to construct your worldview for you. There are a million different resources you could utilize in order to research hot button political issues: There are news agencies, research institutes, think tanks and a whole host of other places you can get information. … Diversify your media consumption generally, really.”