Brace yourself, a rare moment of unity between third-party emote providers and Twitch is actually happening; be still our beating hearts, Hell must be freezing over.
FrankerFaceZ has stated that they are showing solidarity with Twitch after Gootecks tweeted out support to the violent riot that more than a few have labeled as a coup attempt in Washington DC on January 6, and will remove the PogChamp and variations of the emote to scrub the platform clean of the individual in question.
That being said, they may take our PogChamps, but they’ll never take our Pogs.
They’ve also announced that they have zero intention of removing the Pog emote and other variations that feature Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that many outlets deem radicalized since they’re used in 4Chan and other hives of villainy across the internet. These same places that regularly use Pepe The Frog also use the English language: whether or not that will be banned as well is not yet to be seen, although there sure is a precedent.
Modern Warfare removed the ‘OK’ gesture after a racist used it after his arrest: this, of course, means that the ‘OK’ symbol is a gesture of white-power and racist undertones because 4Chan thought it would be hilarious to try roughly a year ago.
The idea behind what began as a joke was that the ‘OK’ gesture could be seen to have a ‘W’ and a ‘P’ in it, which apparently stood for White Power. As the days progress, we’re becoming entirely disconnected from reality and sentenced to this bizarre world where anything and everything must be scrubbed.
That being said, Twitch has managed to fall on the right side of this event after removing the ‘Blind Playthrough‘ tag and offering a three-day ban for a woman that eagerly advertised her OnlyFans account on a Twitch broadcast for almost nine minutes.
The community as a whole isn’t entirely too eager to support someone that wants to desecrate a monument to democracy within the United States, regardless of how long they’ve been spammed in the chats.
Some fans have had fantastic ideas to replace PogChamp with the faces of streamers at random, belying a sense of community and compassion that bleeds their communities together in a large, singular passion: gaming.
The problem is how to curate and keep the largest streaming community from turning into an absolute cesspool, and that’s something that multiple outlets have struggled valiantly with, from Reddit to Twitter, Diggs to Twitch. Here’s hoping there can actually be a balance struck, instead of washing everything that someone could take offense with.
