As the gaming industry booms, platforms like Twitch are rife with misogyny, racism and homophobia. Journalist Charlotte Henry explains how offline prejudice fuels online abuse.
It’s a cliché to say art imitates life. However, in the modern age, it is apparent that it is still the case. As the streaming sector continues to increase, societal issues can be seen to influence different streaming platforms.
The gaming industry is arguably often underrepresented in the News, yet in 2025, PC gaming alone went up by 2.5% to $39.9 billion. However, like other media platforms, the gaming industry has its own set of issues.
One platform that is rife with reports of abuse, racism, and homophobia is the game streaming website Twitch. Reports show that 30% have been sent inappropriate content and 14% have received rape threats, despite figures showing that female gamers make up only about 20% of Twitch users.
Charlotte Henry is a journalist who has been reporting on Tech and Media in society for over 15 years. In the past year, Henry published her latest book called Stream Wars: How Getting Everything We Wanted Changed Entertainment Forever.
“The internet is just a reflection of the real world in many ways, right? So we have sexism, homophobia, and racism in the real world. So that is going to inevitably move into online spaces just because it exists, right? Yeah. And that’s the sad truth.” Charlotte told us.
Issues with the streaming service, not just sexism but racism and homophobia, seem only to appear periodically in the media, and are lost in the other problems of society. Charlotte argues that it is often drowned out by other issues in society. “There’s so much going on in the world, right? It’s always going to be an ebb and flow of how stories are covered.”
Charlotte used an example of a female Twitch streamer, Danielle Barriek, who owned the Twitch account ‘The Dando’. In an interview, Barriek observed that in some cases, men feel that women don’t belong in the gaming space, or even worse, that women are there only to please male players.
At the same time, some female players have tried to take back control by choosing to sexualise their content.
When asked if female users do this to take back a sense of control, Henry argues that this response is dependent on the user. “It will be a case-by-case basis, for some it will be giving them a sense of control, for some it they’ll have worked out that that gets them more money, for some it they’ll, maybe they’re having fun doing that.”
The prevalent sexism on Twitch seems to manifest as a result of society’s misogyny. “We know there’s an underlying misogyny in lots of different creative spaces… We just know that.”
Charlotte wrote her book because: “I think there has been a fundamental shift now in how we’re consuming stuff. I think that now streaming is really at the core. I think it’s quite established.”
The Twitch streaming platform boasts a large and active community. According to Henry’s book as of 2023, Twitch had an average of 106 million monthly users. When asked about why Twitch hasn’t done more to stop the abuse, Charlotte pointed out that there is a balance. “They are wary of losing, how can I put this, the vibe of the space, right? It’s a bit raw because it can be a bit of a free-for-all when it wants to be. And so there is a balance to be struck.”
In 2022, after a mass protest where there was a call to boycott Twitch for a day, along with several influential streamers pushing to abandon Twitch and find other platforms, Twitch finally deleted about 15 million bot accounts. The game streaming service has also given chat moderators the ability to observe certain accounts they believe to be trolls or bots, and filed lawsuits against two people they believed to be leading hate campaigns, primarily against LGBTQ+ gamers and people of colour.
While there seem to be issues in the gaming sector of streaming that project systemic problems in society, not just misogyny, but homophobia and racism as well. With Twitch initially not actively responding, however, after much intervention from the users themselves in very recent years, the game streaming website has taken action in the right direction to ensure the safety of all its users.
Charlotte Henry’s book Streaming Wars: How Getting Everything We Wanted Changed Entertainment Forever is out now.
