Twitch, Where Far-Right Influencers Feel at Home

On PoliticsBarred from Twitter and Facebook as Trump was, social media’s younger conspiracy theorists are moving to Twitch.Credit…Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesApril 27, 2021, 6:19 p.m. ETWhat’s the biggest political surprise of 2021? Not the Democrats’ upset wins in Georgia, flipping the Senate in their favor. Not President Biden’s leftward swerve.How about the fact that, after he was kicked off Twitter and Facebook, former President Donald Trump pretty much just … went away. He didn’t start his own social media company, as some close observers thought he might, and he didn’t mount a major public battle to get his accounts reinstated. He just quietly retreated (for now) to Mar-a-Lago.Be honest: Did you ever think that would happen?Still, the behavior of one man — no matter how famous, no matter how formidable a troll — does not determine the behavior of others. And as Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have cracked down on misinformation, the internet’s younger and spryer purveyors of far-right conspiracy theories have moved elsewhere.One platform that has particularly attracted them is Twitch, an Amazon-owned livestreaming video site that our tech reporter Kellen Browning describes in a recent article as “a new mainstream base of operations for many…
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