One of the oldest and most popular global emotes on Twitch was removed from service after Twitch said “the face of the emote encourages[ed] more violence after what happened on Capitol Hill [Wednesday]. ”
This face belongs to Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, an old Street Fighter professional and commentator. Since 2012 and until yesterday, Gutierrez has been immortalized on Twitch in the form of the chat emote “PogChamp” (short for “champion of the games player”), which depicted an exaggerated and animated face he made for the first time in a video of 2010.
Twitch’s decision to remove the emoticon (one of his personalized chat room emojis) appears to be focused on a series of tweets that Gutierrez made on Wednesday afternoon, expressing sympathy for the “#MAGAMartyr” shot during the violent pro-Trump invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Gutierrez continued to ask whether her death would lead to “civil unrest” or whether she “would die in vain”. In the hours before Twitch’s decision, a number of people in and around the Twitch community had begun to draw attention to Gutierrez’s tweets and / or suggest that the emote be removed or substituted.
In 2018, Twitch launched a new harassment policy that began to consider “verifiable conduct of hate or harassment that occurs outside of Twitch” in its moderation decisions.
“We want the feeling and the 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,” said Twitch as part of his tweeted statement. “However, we cannot in good conscience continue to allow the use of the image. We will work with the community to create a new emote for Twitch’s hottest moments.”
Twitch viewers used the PogChamp emote about 2 million times a day, according to TwitchEmote.com statistics, and was the fifth most popular across the site, according to StreamElements. The meme behind the emotes has evolved to the point that just saying “poggers” or “pog” in a stream or chat can express the same enthusiasm or surprise, to the point that even Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn. ) tried to use it.
Recently, in 2018, Twitch partnered with Gutierrez to promote a paid animated personalized “cheermote” of PogChamp’s image. That promotion included a video where Gutierrez joked about a “strong legal team” creating cheermote as an alternative to “suing each of you for copyright infringement.”
In 2016, Gutierrez told Reddit AMA that being the face of the emote “doesn’t look like anything because it’s not something I created, did it on purpose or even said ‘ok’ to.”
Until Twitch decides on a new PogChamp emote, there are many people on social networks giving very funny suggestions to get the best facial expression of astonishment available.