Twitchis one of the most prominent streaming platforms on the internet right now, particularly when it comes to video game streams. It’s been hit with problems recently, including a massive data leak and hate swarms against streamers, for whichTwitch has deployed machine learning to find suspicious users.
Of course,Twitchis not just a platform for game streaming, all sorts of content is streamed by all kinds of streamers on the regular. This includes personal anecdotes, conversations, anything that the streamer in question thinks will capture the viewer’s imagination and attention. This has led to a lot of tags to label content, and a new one was just added that is raising some eyebrows.
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Twitch added, among other, console-related tags, tags for Haskell, Worldbuilding, Multiple Sclerosis and, perhaps most interestingly, Satanist. This prompted one Twitch streamer, Cohh Carnage, to complain via Twitter. The core of Carnage’s complaint is that Twitch is adding Satanist as a tag before Interactive, a tag that Carnage and many other streamers have asked for for many years. Its high demand is due to the fact that many streams feature high interactivity with their chat, a feature which brings the viewers more into the experience than simplyflooding the streamer with positivity(although that’s still good).
For many streamers, this might well seem like a strange choice. While this likely won’t be enough to getstreamers to leave Twitch for YouTube like Ludwig did, it appears to be an odd choice. But there’s one group for whom this likely makes all the sense in the world: Satanists. Unbeknownst to some, Satanism is a government-recognized relgion in the United States, and one of the core tenets of The Satanic Temple (one Satanic group) is religious equality. That is, the cessation of discrimination against people due to their religious beliefs.
By this logic the inclusion of a Satanist tag is one that makes total sense, as Twitch has steadily added other religious tags such as Buddhism. With this, Twitch itself is following the Satanist principle of non-discrimination. Perhaps a Satanist called out Twitch on this likePokimane called out an obsessive fan, but it’s likely no one will ever know for sure why Twitch added this tag now as opposed to another time, or before an Interactive tag.
This does raise the question of how much Satanic streaming is done on Twitch. At the moment it’s hard to tell, since the tag is so new, but that may change soon, and it may get used in ways that are not intended. If it is for Satanic content it could be for anything from protest footage to giveaways likePokimane’s recent scholarship giveaway. Only time will tell.
