Profitable Addictainment: The Intersection of Entertainment, Hate Speech, and Radicalization on Kick.com
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Abstract
The research investigates the case of Kick, a new online livestreaming platform owned by the recent rapidly growing crypto-gambling company Stake. The project demonstrates how livestreaming platforms are capitalizing on the role of entertainment, and the rise of hyper visible gambling content online. Investigating how hate speech and hegemonic ideologies get constructed, consumed, and circulated in an online live-streaming platform by creators and users through the consumable object of entertainment. Highlighting the controversial and deeply neoliberal profit-driven practices of digital labor by creators and audiences. Entertainment always occupies a dominating ideological place within media structures (Postman, 1985; Frith, 1999; Sun, 2002; Han, 2019), and here the role of entertainment is investigated to show how entertainment deprives a ‘regular’ form of consumption. Analyzing how intersections of entertainment, hate speech, and gambling converge into the roofied cocktail of uniquely damaging content—one which becomes salient in the profit-making cycle of the platformed entertainment in the digital culture and economy.
Through utilizing the walkthrough method of analysing 10 highest viewed livestreams over a period of 3 months. The walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), which involves documentation of the affordances of the app—with the goal to slow down the hyperactive nature of digital apps to digestible analyses of the forms of habitual consumptions and ideal users.
I argue that Kick’s unique milieu exerts an alienating and addictive effect on its users through the mix of hateful radicalized discourse and hyper visible hardcore gambling content, constituting a specific form of entertainment.
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