Bernie Sanders Just Launched a Twitch Channel
Credit to Author: Caroline Haskins| Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2019 14:38:21 +0000
The presidential campaign for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders launched a Twitch channel on Monday night.
Sanders is the second 2020 presidential candidate to have a Twitch channel. Andrew Yang, an Independent candidate popular on Reddit and 4chan, has had a Twitch channel since last year.
Sanders has a “Donate” link on his Twitch page, which leads users to a separate page with a Twitch stream on the left and a donation portal on the right. At the time of writing, Sanders has over 8,800 Twitch followers (Yang has 225).
The Sanders Twitch channel launch marks an emerging trend among politicians in using live-streaming platforms in order to communicate with constituents or potential voters. Freshman Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made a habit of frequently using Instagram Live, where she talks about politics and answers questions while cooking or, say, building IKEA furniture. While Ocasio-Cortez has appeared on Twitch, she does not have her own channel.
The Sanders Twitch channel stream chat is active, and most of the comments are jokes about electing the first gamer president.
“Wait, does this mean if bernie wins, we’ll have our first game president?” user koolmin23 said.
“Probably not. Obama played minecraft,” user BearsKillYou replied.
“Bernie Sanders for Minecraft Mondays,” user cris_dela_zerda said.
“can’t wait for bernie to yeet the rich,” user enteran said.
Some of the commenters appear to support the candidate, while some of the commenters appear to use a mix of irony or sarcasm to indicate a lack of support. The Stream Chat is currently in slow mode, meaning that users need to wait one to several seconds before submitting another comment. This indicates that the stream mostly likely has a human moderator on the campaign.
The Bernie Sanders campaign did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment. We will update the article if we hear back.
This article originally appeared on VICE US.