The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.
However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and Twitch users are in fact more likely to participate in right-wing protests, though there is also less polarisation here on topics like climate change than there is on other platforms.
Twitch streamers are usually very frequently active, and this increases the likelihood that they may also refer to political issues; in fact, the Greens candidate for German Chancellor Robert Habeck even appeared in a chat with a prominent German Twitch streamer ahead of the 2025 election.
How much political content is there in Twitch streams, then? This project selected the most followed German Twitch streamers related to gaming, excluding NSFW content, and downloaded their videos from January to March 2025 (around the elections); these were auto-transcribed using WhisperX, and chat logs were also captured. This content was then coded for topics, processed using semi-supervised topic modelling, and analysed for sentiment.
Preliminary results from this show that gameplay and monetisation remain the most prominent topics by far; domestic politics, defence, and foreign politics as well as social security and health appear at times as well. Male streamers tend to focus more on gameplay and monetisation as well as ‘hard’ political topics; women focus more on lifestyle and health, and the sentiment of their streams tends to be more negative.
But how does the audience perceive such content, and how do streamers themselves reflects on their own roles as political actors? This was explored through interviews with some 50 Twitch users representing various identities, as well as male and female streamers. Twitch users are mainly on the platform for entertainment reasons, but political content appears in chatty videos, and are perceived as part of a collective experience.
Streamers themselves sometimes deliberately discuss, but in other cases also deliberately avoid political topics – those who monetise their streaming seek to avoid topics that might alienate their audiences, for instance.
Twitch thus bridges entertainment with politics, and streamers act as role models and political influencers for their audiences. This is unevenly distributed across male and female streamers, but users perceive streamers as very authentic due to the long, live streams that are common on the platform.
