THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 ST 9
on the platform. He also noticed the algo-
rithm shifting away from video.
He set up a Twitch channel in March of
that year and began streaming sporadical-
ly. “I wanted a place where I could have peo-
ple congregate every day,” he said.
His streams were slow growing; the first
had just 35 viewers, but over time he began
going on other streamers’ shows and col-
laborating with fellow content creators,
which helped expand his audience. Come
2019, he was streaming for hours at a time,
nearly every day. There were some bumps
in the road. Mr. Piker has been barred tem-
porarily four times for running afoul of the
platform’s copyright and content guide-
lines.
Throughout, Mr. Piker’s goal has been to
rewrite the narrative he sees in the news
about the left. He felt that progressives had
an image problem in part because news or-
ganizations were playing into bad-faith por-
trayals of activists and organizers.
“Everywhere you went on the internet,
accelerated by Fox News, the left was seen
as hysterical, emotional, blue-haired social
justice warriors,” he said. “They turned the
concept of fighting for social justice into
something negative.”
“ ‘SJW’ is considered a pejorative,” he
added, referring to the abbreviation of the
term “social justice warrior.” “That’s crazy
to me. The thing is, those people have a
righteous cause, they have the right to be
emotional and frustrated, but unfortu-
nately, the right has been able to create a
very successful narrative.”
In January, Mr. Piker transitioned to
streaming full time. Previously, while still
employed by “The Young Turks,” he had
been essentially working double shifts,
working during the day and streaming well
into the night and early morning.
The Democratic presidential primary
was in full swing, and Mr. Piker covered and
analyzed the process for millions online.
Twitch sent him an “IRL Backpack”
streaming kit that allowed him to broadcast
on-the-ground, including from organizing
events in Nevada and a Bernie Sanders
rally in Boston.
When the Black Lives Matter protests
took hold this summer, Mr. Piker covered
those, too. “I showed what the people on the
ground were saying rather than the way lo-
cal news or the mainstream media was cov-
ering it to some degree,” he said. “I broadly
criticized the local news networks that hy-
per-focused on looting and all these other
tropes they were building about these pro-
tests.”
Mr. Piker kept the momentum up on his
channel throughout the debates this fall. On
Oct. 20, he played the game Among Us with
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Ilhan Omar for an audience of hun-
dreds of thousands. He also began to pre-
pare his viewers for what he said would be
an election night like no other.
On Nov. 3, Mr. Piker woke up, hit the gym,
then began to stream — and didn’t stop for
16 hours. His marathon election-nightstream has been viewed more than 4.5 mil-
lion times and had more than 225,000 con-
current viewers at its peak.
What viewers find captivating is the way
Mr. Piker consumes information in real
time. “Last night I watched Piker and his
guests play for time as he clicked on the
wrong tab in his disorganized browser at
least three times,” Gita Jackson, a reporter
for Vice, wrote in an article posted on Nov. 4.
“I saw myself, and the way that I engage
with politics and the news, in not just Pik-
er’s political opinions but the way he uses
the internet itself.”
Anne Alexander, a 33-year-old New
Yorker, watched Mr. Piker’s channel for
hours the day after the election.
“Hasan consumes the internet at the
speed of the internet,” she said. “He has
50,000 tabs open and he’s going from Fox to
CNN to Twitter to whatever. He’s consum-
ing news from across the aisle. He’s on so-
cial media, on reputable news sources, he’s
also reading all the comments that come in,
then sometimes he’s listening to commenta-
tors and responding to them. It’s extremely
dynamic.”
Twitch’s chief operating officer, Sara
Clemens, said Mr. Piker’s stream was one
example of how Twitch had diversified its
content beyond video games over the past
year. She said his stream reached Twitch’s
“core” viewership: millennials and Gen Z.
“It’s a really powerful way to engage with
that audience,” Ms. Clemens said.
Though he frequently hosts journalists
from mainstream news outlets, Mr. Piker
said he didn’t have a desire to pursue a ca-
reer in cable news. In fact, he said that being
so comfortable streaming for hours gave
him an advantage over cable news on elec-
tion night.
For the pundits and analysts working
long hours these past few weeks, he said, 10-
and 11-hour days in front of the camera are
unusual. But for Mr. Piker, it’s the norm. “I
stream those hours every single day,” he
said.Above left, from
Hasan Piker’s
YouTube account.
Above, his stream
on election night.
“People came to
me because they
wanted to hear a
point of view —
and maybe not a
manicured point of
view either, but an
honest point of
view,” he said.Mr. Piker with the
media personality
Richard Fowler, left,
at a “Young Turks”
event in Washington
in spring 2018.Rewriting
the story
seen in
news of
the left.
KRIS CONNOR/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE YOUNG TURKS