Pogchamp, one of the most prominent faces in gaming culture, has been removed from the Twitch live streaming service, the company announced. The decision was made in the light of his face in the real world, the fighting game personality Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, who used social media to, in Twitch’s words, encourage “more violence after what happened on Capitol Hill today”.
After a violent takeover of the Capitol by Trump supporters – and calls for impeachment of major political figures – Gutierrez asked his followers to continue the “civil unrest” that unfolded over January 6. The personality invoked the name of a woman who died during Trump’s takeover, encouraging her followers to watch a video about her passing.
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Coming soon, many important game personalities announced that they were banning the wide-eyed emote from their channels, if not asking the platform itself, Twitch, to take action against it.
At 9 pm on Wednesday, the San Francisco-based company did just 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 the tracking service Twitch StreamElements, PogChamp was the fifth most used expression on the live streaming website. Recognizing this legacy, the company said that although PogChamp is a big part of the Twitch culture, the platform cannot, in good conscience, “allow the use of the image”. Twitch added that it would be working with the community to design something that would replace the old PogChamp emote with something equally “overkill”.
We want the feeling and use of Pog to continue – its meaning is much greater than the person portrayed or the image itself – and it has a big place in Twitch culture. However, we cannot in good conscience continue to allow the use of the image.
– Twitch (@Twitch) January 7, 2021
Twitch community guidelines prohibit violence, including using platforms outside of the live broadcast service to encourage it. In late 2020, Twitch updated its harassment guidelines to ban the Confederate Flag, along with some other policy-related adjustments in the service.