How News on Twitch Challenges the Boundaries of Journalism

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

Twitch is not a conventional news provider, but news is nonetheless present there: it provides a platformed information space for news content, too. The quality of news has always been contingent, dynamic, and contested, and Twitch should therefore not be dismissed out of hand as a space for the news – however, journalistic boundary work continues to place news on Twitch outside of the boundaries of journalism.

But what is constructed here is, in the words of Crystal Abidin, a refracted public: publics that are constructed through audiences’ techniques for the circumvention of the limitations imposed by infrastructure affordances and journalistic boundaries. Twitch streamers have audiences measuring in the tens of thousands, and this means they must now also engage in manual and automated content moderation on the platform; what is visible to users and researchers on the platform therefore represents a refraction of actual activities.

The comments section is in itself part of the streamer’s broadcast, and this further blurs boundaries; there are shades of darkness from content that is within, on, or beyond the boundaries of what we might consider to be news and journalism. The project studied this by using the walkthrough method, selecting official Twitch partners, exploring their self-descriptions on the platform, focussing especially on controversial (i.e. repeatedly banned) streamers, and collecting their streams through screen captures.

The news cycle here is that streamers watch the news, use their own streams to discuss the news in various biased ways, through this generate comments in their sidebars, and then also respond to those comments; this cycle repeats continuously. As streamers express their opinions, audiences will sometimes respond to rephrase their views in order to help them avoid further bans from the platform. Others actively seek to transgress policies: one streamer casually showed porn in the background of his shows, for instance, without being sanctioned in any way. This provides some interesting challenges to the question of what counts as journalism and who counts as a journalist.