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Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going live on Twitch in new streaming series 'Talk with the People' (www.polygon.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

But twitch is owned by Amazon and frankly they can and do moderate Twitch streams.

This is not supposed to be a discouragement of politicians connecting with the public via any means necessary.

I just want to point out the flawed logic of saying news media is owned by billionaires so it can't be trusted, but twitch, also owned by a billionaire can somehow be trusted.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    They aren't yet putting up barriers since their sole purpose is people connecting to each other. There is every chance they do move to restricting access but I think it would be the death of Twitch and certainly Twitter if they started doing so. Social media doesn't require us to trust some group of people to choose our content for us and as such is a lot less prone to that bias and billionaire control. That isn't to say the billionaires don't have an effect, on Twitter what people are exposed to by the algorithm is very intentional and controlled as is the front page roll on Twitch, but unlike mainstream media its still possiblr to see and connect with the unfavoured content and grass roots movements can still form. I would prefer this was all on the fediverse but its not where the people are yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I use twitch. It doesn't take much at all to get a ban of any kind. I've seen twitch streamers get banned mid stream. I think this stream in particular is likely to attract a lot of people who disagree with his political leanings and want to troll. It'll be heavily modded and there are likely to be topics that will not be discussed because they're problematic enough that a troll could use twitch's own guidelines against the stream.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    it serves 2 purposes reaching the gen-z pop, if amazon decides to block him, then the viewers/audiences will know and it will cause a streisand effect.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I think this cuts two ways.

    1. If anything goes wrong with this stream at all, whether it's Amazon's fault or not, it will be perceived as if they sabotaged it by the people who support him.
    2. If nothing goes wrong then we have the same problem we had with ByteDance and Tik Tok, where the perception is that the platform is a "bastion of free speech that people who support him put more trust in. We saw how this went with Tik Tok. Where people were convinced that it was censoring them less and promoting more liberal content when in fact we know from recent news articles that this is not in fact the case.

    Neither of these things should make twitch a good platform for this type of thing, but it does happen to be what is available and well known.

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