Pogchamp, one of the most famous faces of gaming culture, has been removed from the live service Twitch, announced the company. The decision was made in light of his real face, and the fighting personality Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, who used social media to, in Twitch’s words, “encourage further violence after what happened in the Capitol today.”
After a violent takeover of Capitol Hill by Trump supporters – and calls for the prosecution of key political figures – Gutierrez asked his followers to continue the “civil unrest” that took place during January 6. The personality called out the name of a woman who during the Trump takeover of supporters and encouraged his followers to watch a video about her passing.
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In short order, many top game personalities announced that they ban the big-eyed emote from their channels if they do not ask the platform itself, Twitch, to take action against it.
Wednesday night at 9 p.m., the company in San Francisco did exactly that. Users can no longer use the emote on the service. Polygon contacted Twitch for comment and a representative pointed to the comments made on Twitter. According to Twitch tracking service StreamElements, PogChamp was the fifth most used term on the live stream website. The company acknowledged that the legacy, although PogChamp is a big part of Twitch culture, said that the platform does not ‘use the image’ in good conscience. Twitch added that it would work with the community to design something to replace the former PogChamp emote with something that was just as ‘hype’.
We want the sentiment and use of Pog to survive – its significance is far greater than that of the person portrayed or the image itself – and it has a large place in Twitch culture. However, we cannot continue in good conscience to make the image possible.
– Twitch (@Twitch) 7 January 2021
Twitch’s community guidelines prohibit violence, including the use of platforms outside the live streaming service to encourage it. In late 2020, Twitch updated its harassment guidelines to ban the Confederate Flag, along with some other policy adjustments to the service.