Examining the linguistic power of emotes: multimodal race discourse on Twitch

The rise of live-streaming platforms such as Twitch has transformed individuals’ everyday media practices by expanding opportunities for participation in public discourse. Within this broader media ecology, Twitch emotes, platform-specific pictorial tokens used to convey meaning in channel chat, function as key semiotic resources through which users communicate and participate in streaming communities. This study examines how three focal emotes, TriHard, C’monBruh, and XmiraCHICKEN, are deployed, transformed, and repurposed in ways that can both reproduce and subvert anti-Black racism and other racialized forms of harassment on the platform. Through a multi-sited digital ethnography, our findings show that the three focal emotes take up distinct trajectories of circulation and meaning-making across Twitch streaming communities. Taken together, the analysis demonstrates that emote practices are a consequential mode of interaction through which power relations are reproduced and contested in live-streaming ecologies.