Reaction as Governance: A Digital Ethnography of Streamer-Mediated Political Sensemaking on X

This pre-print presents a qualitative digital ethnography examining how political, cultural, and social reality is mediated through streamer reactions and platform affordances on X (formerly Twitter). Using a corpus of screenshot-preserved interaction events collected across four consecutive batches, the study analyzes how geopolitical news, interpersonal conflict, spectacle, apology rituals, platform interventions, and economic precarity are metabolized through influencer ecosystems. Rather than deliberation or debate, the findings reveal a reaction-governance loop in which interpretation is outsourced to personalities, legitimacy is validated through engagement metrics, and dissent is managed via correction, sanction, or exclusion. The paper introduces a role-based behavioral taxonomy (A–T) describing recurrent positions such as reaction authority proxies, ritual apologizers, platform governors, exclusion advocates, and economic transparency confessors. Across all cases, reaction emerges as the dominant mode of political sensemaking, with platforms governing meaning indirectly through visibility control and attention incentives rather than explicit authority. This work contributes to digital ethnography, platform studies, and political communication research by documenting the mechanisms through which political reality is stabilized and enforced in contemporary reaction-driven media ecosystems.