Affective Spamming on Twitch: Rhetorics of an Emote-Only Audience in a Presidential Inauguration Livestream

Abstract

• Audiences invent rhetorical strategies within the constraints of social media. • Spamming is a well-established strategy that social media users deploy on platforms. • An “emote-only” live chat of a presidential livestream displayed 12,012 posts. • Twitch's popular emotes such as “ForsenE” and “kreygasm” were affective spam. • Emotes on sexual, racial, and gender pride were much less frequent in the live chat. This article analyzes what is at stake when social media platforms restrict the modes in which audience members can publicly compose and communicate. More specifically, we are concerned with how platforms adjust users’ multimodal affordances during livestreaming public events, and how these adjustments affect public deliberation. This article focuses on an historic, political Twitch livestream: U.S. President Joe Biden's inaugural address on January 20, 2021. For rhetoric and writing scholars, this event is significant for two reasons: (1) it is the first presidential inauguration to be livestreamed, officially, on Twitch by the president's committee, and (2) the livestream's chat was restricted to “emote-only,” meaning online audience members could only communicate with Twitch emotes in the “live chat” space of the stream. Based on an analysis of more than 12,000 comments, our findings support a theory of what we call affective spam , a more nuanced, visual-content-based form of spam that online audiences use to influence public communication and deliberation on social media during live events.