Comments

Advisor: Dr. Kier Hanratty

Department of Economics

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

With the success of the video game and eSports industries, comes the rise of Twitch.tv (also known as Twitch), the most popular live-streaming platform today. Being that the most popular activity to stream on Twitch.tv is video games, there is a lot of overlap between those who play video games or are avid eSports fans and those who watch Twitch. However, these communities are notorious for their hostility towards women. The goal of this study is to assess, if any, the differences in atmosphere, as well as the differences in the presence of gendered language/harassment, profanity, and non-gaming/non-activity related words between male and female Twitch streamers. In this study, I web-scraped live Twitch chats, pulled statistically overrepresented words, and ran various probit regressions to accomplish this. Findings indicate that there is somewhat a presence of gendered language/harassment and profanity on Twitch.tv. There is also a slight but statistically significant difference in probability of profanity, and environment between male and female Twitch streamers. The specific marginal effects of gender showed that for a male streamer, the likelihood of presence of harassment or profanity increased by 1.26%, while the likelihood of presence of harassment decreased by .08% in comparison to female streamers. Lastly, for a male streamer, the likelihood of presence of profanity increased by 1.42% in comparison to female streamers. Harassment, however, showed to be statistically insignificant, possibly due to various caveats.

Download

Share

COinS