Streamer’s apology for racist rant exposes the rot in streaming culture

Last week, top Twitch streamer Zach Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, went on a racist rant against Palestinians, expressing apathy for the relentless military campaign against them that has claimed over 40,000 lives, many of them children. "I don't give a fuck," he said. "They're terrible people."

Hoyt is known for his incendiary language, but reactions to this recent outburst were enough to give him pause. Shortly after the stream, Hoyt posted an apology, saying, "Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing. My bad." Twitch suspended his channel for 14 days, and Hoyt said that he would be stepping away from leadership duties at his media company, OTK, and its subsidiaries. In a video posted to YouTube, Hoyt said streaming has had a negative impact on his personality and that over the last two years, he's been, "slowly devolving into the most mean-spirited ... rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself."

Hoyt's video has unintentionally shed light on a major reason that being online can feel so miserable. It's one of the rare instances of a person with such a huge following - 1.8 million followers on Twitch alone - has acknowledged that the rise of reckless, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic behavior stems from streaming culture itself. 

Popular creators have been relying on shock and outrage to generate views for years. In 2017, at the height of his popularity on YouTube, Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg paid a pair of individuals to hold up a sign displaying a violent antisemitic phrase. One year later, Logan Paul filmed a suicide victim in Japan. More recently, these kinds of behaviors have become the rule rather than the exception. And the problem has grown with the shift to live platforms like Twitch where streamers exploit - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not - outrage farming for the attention it generates.

Jack Doherty, who originally went viral for flipping markers on YouTube, was banned from Kick earlier this month after a livestream showed him crashing his McLaren because he was texting while driving. He asked his camera operator to keep filming even as he and his passengers were pulled from the wreckage covered in blood. Adin Ross gained notoriety streaming NBA 2K, but he's maintained it specifically because his streams are known for hosting racists like Nick Fuentes and alleged rapists like Andrew Tate. 

The platforms bear some responsibility in this. More attention means more eyeballs, so platform operators are incentivized to attract, retain, and appease streamers however they can, even if that sometimes means permitting unsavory behavior. Twitch, the biggest name in the space, takes an aggressive approach to content moderation, ostensibly to maintain the platform's "brand-safe" image to advertisers. But there are always other platforms willing to pick up its outcasts.

When it launched in 2022, Kick became the "anti-Twitch," appealing to creators disaffected by the site's monetization and content policies. But while Kick has exploded in popularity, offering creators an alternative in a landscape dominated by Twitch, it has become known for creators and content that would be banned anywhere else. Last year, Paul "Ice Poseidon" Denino hired a sex worker and then briefly prevented her from leaving when she discovered the encounter was being streamed. Ross showed pornography on his stream and has, on multiple occasions, offered money to fans to do dangerous stunts.