Twitch aggression profile: exploring aggression on a live mixed-media platform

The current study addresses an emerging social issue: violence and aggression on live-streaming social media. It employs Twitch as a target platform for exploration and Cultivation Theory as the theoretical framework. As the originator of the theory, George Gerbner, conducted content analysis of television content to probe violence on the medium in his Cultural Indicators (CI) project, this study seeks to conduct a partial replication of his project on Twitch. Both manual content analysis and computational text analysis were utilized to observe aggression in each of the three media dimensions of Twitch – video game play, streamer broadcast speech, and viewer chat. The results of this study revealed that aggression is prevalent on Twitch across all three media dimensions. Surprisingly, the percentage of violent game play on Twitch is almost the same as the percentage of violent television programs that the original CI team averaged the results between 1967 and 2015. In addition, this study showed that intersections of different types of aggression are common on Twitch. Taken together, although more than half a century has passed since Gerbner and his team’s first CI data collection, media platforms still appeal to their users with aggressive content. Accordingly, the cultural function of storytelling with aggressive messages may still hold in the current era of social media. The findings are further discussed in the context of the current media landscape.