Live streaming politics: Alternative media and construction of online political communities
Abstract
In this study, I engaged in interviews with thirty-eight content creators who live stream political material to audiences on Twitch. The goal of this project was to establish whether the content creators were engaged in one of the two communicative strategies illustrated in past research concerning online communities: diffused intertextual production or centralized intertextual fortification. Through the interviews I came to understand that both strategies took place at the same time within the context of broad, overlapping political communities. The emergent interrelationship between two communities within the channels of Twitch political discussion stands as a dynamic interactive divergence, which involves both communicative strategies utilized by content creators within the context of a single intertextual frame.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Social Media and Politics
Media Studies and Communication
Crime
Deviance
and Social Control
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Communication and Democracy
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Volume
- 60
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 78–95
- Publication date
- 2 January 2026
- Language
- EN