Streamers and users recently react to an odd addition to the streaming platform Twitch tag library that appears before another, long-requested tag.
Twitch is currently one of the most popular streaming platforms on the internet, especially for video game streams. Twitch has recently been plagued by issues, including a massive data leak and hate swarms directed at streamers, for which the company has turned to machine learning to identify suspicious users.
Of course, Twitch isn’t just for game streaming; all kinds of content is regularly streamed by all kinds of streamers. This includes personal anecdotes, conversations, and anything else that the streamer believes will pique the viewer’s interest. This has resulted in a plethora of tags to categorize content, and a new one has just been added that has some people scratching their heads.
Twitch added tags for Haskell, Worldbuilding, Multiple Sclerosis, and, perhaps most intriguingly, Satanist, among other console-related tags. Cohh Carnage, a Twitch streamer, took to Twitter to express his displeasure. Carnage’s main gripe is that Twitch is adding Satanist as a tag before Interactive, which he and many other streamers have been requesting for years. Its popularity stems from the fact that many streams have high interactivity with their chat, a feature that engages viewers more than simply showering positivity on the streamer (though that’s still good).
This may appear to be an unusual choice. There’s one group for whom this is likely to make perfect sense: Satanists. Satanism is a government-recognized religion in the United States, and religious equality is one of the core tenets of The Satanic Temple (one Satanic group). That is, discrimination against people based on their religious beliefs must end.
Twitch has steadily added other religious tags, such as Buddhism, so the addition of a Satanist tag makes perfect sense. Twitch is following the Satanist principle of non-discrimination in this way. Perhaps a Satanist called Twitch out on this, just as Pokimane did with an obsessive fan, but no one will ever know why Twitch added this tag now rather than later, or before the Interactive tag.
This begs the question of how much Satanic content is broadcast on Twitch. Because the tag is so new, it’s difficult to tell right now, but that could change soon, and it could be used in unexpected ways.