TwitchCon, which took place last weekend in San Diego, California, is an overlapping series of cacaphonies. A quick stroll down the show floor reveals a hodgepodge of advertisers like State Farm, booths dedicated to high-profile games like Resident Evil, The Sims, and Minecraft, a tabletop section, a music stage Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has been known to perform on, and eventually, an esports arena. There are also panels in various rooms, as well as an artist alley like you’d find at Comic-Con or an anime convention. But these are all distractions. The real main event – the reason people spend hundreds of dollars to attend – is the streamers.
Despite all the aforementioned sights and sounds, one scene defined TwitchCon 2025. During a meet and greet on Friday, Emily “Emiru” Schunk was approached by a man who proceeded to grab ahold of her and attempted to forcibly kiss her. Schunk’s personal security guard quickly intervened and pushed the assailant away, but after that he was reportedly allowed to roam free. Schunk, rattled, resumed her meet and greet, but the next day she declared that she’ll never return to TwitchCon.
Over the course of the weekend, a handful of other streamers came forward with stories and clips of harassment at and around TwitchCon. In another case that caught the attention of the wider content creation community, a streamer named Emerome was approached by N3on, a notorious shit-stirring IRL streamer more frequently associated with Kick than Twitch, who invited her to a party entirely on the basis that she was “very beautiful” and then, when she sarcastically replied that she loves being objectified and walked away, started screaming that her friend was fat. It should be noted that N3on did not simply buy a ticket to TwitchCon and show up; Twitch featured him and gave him his own meet and greet.
On another occasion, Jack Doherty – who, like N3on, loves to shove cameras in people’s faces and provoke them until they lash out, but who was banned from Kick after crashing a McLaren while looking at his phone, then unbanned, and then banned again a few days later for getting into a street fight – repeatedly shouted the f-slur at a PeachJars, a popular Twitch streamer, after she suggested, correctly, that Doherty is a homophobe.
Clips like these have led many in the Twitch community to decry both TwitchCon security and Twitch as a company and platform. Content creators like Hoyt, Ethan Klein, and John “Tectone” Robertson, absolutely part of the problem, used these incidents as an opportunity to pretend like they care about women – as well as safety or anything else beyond whatever drama of the day gets them views and allows them to go after perceived enemies – while Twitch mainstays like Ben “Cohh Carnage” Cassell and Devin Nash have advocated for Twitch or a new platform like it to implement a strict games-only policy, to eliminate IRL streaming. There were also calls for Twitch to eliminate politics, even though the category is not really directly relevant to anything that happened at TwitchCon (Hoyt, again part of the problem, concurred with Cassell here; hmmm, wonder why).
But these are alluringly simple solutions to a host of complex problems, the kind that play well online but don’t really hold up under scrutiny. For one, the most viewed clips from TwitchCon are illustrative of two related but different problems: 1) Obvious security concerns around streamers’ physical safety, and 2) IRL streamers farming for salacious moments, a type of stream that doesn’t necessarily perform well on Twitch but does lead to engagement in the algorithmic short-form clip slurry that is YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. The latter is a gray area. The former is a can of worms so full-to-bursting that I’d recommend taking cover.
Honestly a good article, and a perfect example of performative security. Security was ever present, hassled people, wore tactical vests and made a big show - but still did nothing of actual value
Twitch backpedaled and said they’ll add moar security, but won’t do anything to actually protect creators like grant them their own security guard.
To me, it’s obvious. Guy didn’t have a knife, didn’t threatened her, it’s some lonely creepy dude who doesn’t respect her and very sick in the head. They don’t need another row of metal detectors, they needed someone managing the line and access to her so he couldn’t just walk up to her, and if he did still make it that close then an immediate boot out of the premises with charges for assault filed with a permanent from all future events.
Instead they just… Let him walk around and be chill, and sounds like he was only banned well after the huge backlash.
