Stars on Twitch, the video game streaming platform, invite viewers into their homes virtually. What happens when one shows up in person?
The unwanted visitor rapped on Kaitlyn Siragusa's front door and peered through the windows of her home on the outskirts of Houston. When she did not answer, he walked around to the back of her house and jiggled a doorknob there.
He had been sending Siragusa, 28, unsettling messages for months and said online that he had sold his home and possessions in Estonia to fly halfway around the world to find her.
"I'm sorry that it took me too long to get here. It was a hell of a challenge," said the man, captured by Siragusa's security cameras in June. Then, speaking to his phone, which he was using to livestream the visit, he added: "But I'm here now."
The man was one of Siragusa's 5 million followers on Twitch, where she goes by Amouranth. She called the police, who eventually came and detained him. The incident was terrifying, she said, but it wasn't the first time she had dealt with what is increasingly going hand in hand with being a high-profile streamer on Twitch: harassment and stalking.
Twitch is best known as a place where people livestream themselves playing video games, but there's more there these days, ranging from cooking demonstrations to political commentary. While Siragusa does occasionally play Raid: Shadow Legends or GeoGuessr, her all-day, hours-long broadcast is more like a cabaret variety show.
Famed for pushing the boundaries of the platform's rules against sexually explicit content, Siragusa can be found donning the costumes of scantily clad video game characters or bantering with her audience while doing her exercise routine.
Though Twitch discourages streamers from wearing swimwear if they are not planning to take a dip, Siragusa is able to broadcast in a bikini: She installed an inflatable hot tub in her bedroom last year.
The vast majority of Twitch's 8 million streamers broadcast themselves for hours at a time and interact with fans who post messages in a chat box. Siragusa said she makes about US$120,000 ($190,000) per month on Twitch from fans who watch advertisements, make one-time donations or pay about US$5 ($10) per month to subscribe to her channel, a commitment that comes with perks like special badges and custom "emotes" — small images used in chat to express a reaction. That's in addition to the more than US$1 million ($1.5 million) she earns monthly on other platforms, like OnlyFans.
The ability of streamers like Siragusa to attract an audience is the lifeblood of Twitch, which makes money through ads and by taking a cut of payments from fans. Amazon paid nearly US$1 billion in 2014 to acquire the company, which averages 31 million daily viewers.
Twitch, more than Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, is an intimate platform, designed to make its stars seem like actual friends of their fans, hanging out virtually with them. Those cosy relationships are a core part of the site's business model. But they sometimes turn unhealthy.
"In livestreams, they see into your home, into your bedroom, and it feels very personal with them," Siragusa said. "I think that is what contributes to a lot of the stalking: They feel like they know you."
Streamers on Twitch and other platforms have had stalkers show up at their homes and at fan conventions, been targeted by armed and violent viewers or dealt with swatting, a sometimes deadly stunt in which someone calls the local police to report a fake crime at a streamer's home, hoping the raid will be caught live on camera.
In response to the harassment, threats and stalkers she has endured since joining Twitch in 2016, Siragusa has bought guns, installed security cameras and gotten a Caucasian shepherd, a breed of guard dog, named Bear. She has been swatted so often that law enforcement agencies in her area know to check her Twitch stream when they get a call. Last year, when a trash can outside Siragusa's house caught on fire, police suspected arson.
"I don't know what else to do at this point, besides build a moat with crocodiles," Siragusa said.
Successful streamers like Siragusa have a dream career — they're paid to hang out and play video games — but they say that as they grow into celebrities, sometimes overnight, Twitch provides little warning about the risks and offers only limited support when dangerous situations arise.
"Harassment or threats have absolutely no place on Twitch, and we use every lever at our disposal to both minimise the risk of harm and respond to harm caused to our community," Twitch said in a statement.
Tom Verrilli, the company's chief product officer, said the vast majority of the interactions on the site were positive. "But, of course, it takes one jerk to ruin the campfire," he said.
A different kind of fame
In the 1950s, psychologists observed the intense emotional attachment that fans could develop toward actors, newscasters and other celebrities and named it a "parasocial relationship" — one-sided, with fans investing time, energy and emotion in stars who were unaware of their existence.
In extreme cases, a fan will "feel as if they own the celebrity or as if they are a personal partner," said Chris Rojek, a sociology professor at City, University of London who has studied celebrity.
But on Twitch, the relationship with a celebrity is not entirely unreciprocated, said Rachel Kowert, a psychologist and research director at Take This, a mental health nonprofit for the gaming community. Instead, Kowert said, it's a one-and-a-half-sided parasocial relationship, because fans typing in the chat box occasionally get a response from the streamer.
To welcome a new subscriber, for instance, Siragusa sometimes writes the viewer's handle on her leg or a pool toy.
Kowert said the interaction between the streamer and the viewer, combined with their essentially being in the same place at the same time via a livestream, resulted in "greater social closeness." Watching Twitch also helped people feel less lonely and depressed during the pandemic, she said, psychological benefits that were perhaps reflected in the numbers: Livestreaming has boomed in the past few years.
Alan Hutchings, a 37-year-old in Dallas, discovered Siragusa's Twitch channel in 2016, when she was playing the shooter game Overwatch and cosplaying as one of the characters in it. An Overwatch player himself, he said, he kept going back because of her ability to tell a story and engage viewers. He got to know many of her other followers.
"It can be a social group, a group of online friends," said Hutchings, a Texas Army National Guard veteran and an employee at a software development company. "It can act as even a support group if someone's having a bad day."
As a moderator on Siragusa's Twitch stream and the Amouranth server on Discord, a messaging platform, he has also seen the darker side of the connections formed over Twitch. Hutchings has dealt with unruly fans and observed how the attachments can go wrong — the extreme, unhealthy kinds that people form when they don't talk with other fans and obsess over the streamer at the exclusion of everything else.
Brooke Bond has also experienced the benefits of an engaged community on Twitch — and the extreme drawbacks. In 2018, when she began streaming from her parents' home in the Portland, Oregon, area, talking to her fans helped relieve stress.
She started out playing the video game Fortnite, but also opened up to her viewers about her anxiety about college, her decision to quit her part-time job to stream full time and her love life, which was of particular interest to her audience after she began dating another popular Twitch streamer. Bond, under the username BrookeAB, quickly amassed a huge following.
A year later, she told her fans about an unexpected opportunity: 100 Thieves, an esports organisation, had offered to pay for her to move to Los Angeles and live in a house for content creators.
It seemed like an exciting move for her. Some of her fans didn't see it that way.
Playing it safe
Viewers accused Bond of selling out and expressed a startling degree of possessiveness over her life. Some doxxed her, posting her and her family's address on various social media platforms. Others sent her death threats.
Twitch, Bond said, was supportive, barring the worst accounts from the platform, encouraging her to contact the police and offering advice for how to scrub her personal information from the internet. But beyond that, Bond said, the platform did not know what else could be done, especially because the harassment had moved beyond Twitch onto other social media sites.
"I think they want to help — they just don't have any clue of what to do," she said.
Bond and her family spent tens of thousands of dollars on a private investigator, who got the FBI involved to track down her harassers. Her situation improved, but threatening followers persist. In April, after Bond, now 24, talked on Twitch about her plans to go to the Coachella music festival, online harassers threatened to kill her mother and set her house on fire if she went.
She cancelled the trip. Just in case.
David Huntzinger, a talent manager in Los Angeles who represents digital stars, said celebrities often had to contend with unhealthy obsessions from some fans. But livestreamers, he said, are uniquely at risk because of the personal details they may casually expose. An idle comment about a favourite cafe, a reference to a loved one or even a glimpse of the street outside a window could give obsessed fans the ammunition they need to intrude.
"You can't expect someone who is 18 and an overnight celebrity to have thought through all of these issues," Huntzinger said.
The woman known to her 680,000 followers on Twitch as DizzyKitten certainly hadn't when she joined Twitch in 2013 as a 20-year-old. DizzyKitten, whose first name is Brandi, eventually dropped out of community college in Arkansas to spend her days streaming herself playing World of Warcraft and Counterstrike. She asked that her last name be withheld because she's now more private about personal details.
But at first, she had no idea the harm that could come from giving out her personal information, so she freely added viewers to her personal Facebook page and told them her real name.
In 2018, a man from Washington state told Brandi that he was travelling to see her, sending her photos and updates during his 3,220km Greyhound bus ride to her small town. He had her address and was convinced she was his wife, even though she had never met him or responded to his messages. Brandi contacted the police but was told that officers wouldn't intervene until he showed up.
Many Twitch streamers have had this experience: Police do not usually act on reports of threats, only to real-world danger. After the man arrived in the middle of the night, Brandi called 911 and he was arrested; charged with stalking, he is in state custody in a psychiatric hospital.
"I just couldn't believe it," she said. "I couldn't wrap my head around how something had escalated this far."
She spent thousands of dollars on therapy and gun lessons, and moved to a gated community.
Despite that, another stalker claiming to be in love with her appeared at her doorstep just weeks ago after finding her new address — and her mother's phone number — online. Brandi barricaded herself in a room in her house with a gun. The man left before the police arrived; she is worried he might come back.
Micro-celebrities who are famous among a niche group, such as a Twitch audience, do not tend to realise how accessible their personal information is until the harassment starts, said Leigh Honeywell, chief executive of Tall Poppy, a company that is focused on personal cybersecurity and that has advised Twitch.
Remaining anonymous could be more challenging for Americans than for online talent Honeywell has worked with in other parts of the world because, she said, data brokers in the US are legally able to sell personal information, including home addresses.
"It's fundamentally difficult to be truly private," she said.
A better warning system?
Twitch has an introductory page for new creators, with advice from successful streamers on getting started. Most of it is technical — about optimal lighting, computer and camera systems — or about attracting an audience. There are no prominent warnings about personal security or the downsides of fame.
However, in an offbeat moment midway through one of the "tips" videos, Max Gonzalez, who streams as GassyMexican and was paid by Twitch to offer his advice to newcomers, sounds a faint warning.
"I might have thought twice about revealing my face," Gonzalez says. (Some of Twitch's most popular streamers, such as Ironmouse, use cartoon avatars that hide their appearance.)
Gonzalez said security dos-and-don'ts should be more front and centre on Twitch for new streamers to "get that into somebody's brain early on."
A stalker has harassed him and people close to him for several years, Gonzalez said. When he attends a convention organised by Twitch where fans can meet streamers in person, he flags his stalker to security to ensure that she won't be allowed entry.
He used to do public meetups with his viewers, but stopped after the 2016 murder of Christina Grimmie, a YouTube star who was shot while signing autographs after a concert. "It shook up a lot of creators when it happened," Gonzalez said.
Twitch is not unaware of the threats. A Twitch spokeswoman said the company planned in the coming months to livestream a session that will educate streamers about real-world risks. In recent years, it has increased its efforts to build safety into the platform, said Verrilli. He noted, for example, a change the site made to obscure personal contact information on the Twitch settings page, so streamers sharing their computer screens wouldn't accidentally expose their address or phone number.
Angela Hession, Twitch's vice president of global trust and safety, said her team kept creators up to date on "how to protect themselves, both on Twitch and off," including by offering a safety centre with tips for preventing doxxing, swatting and stalking.
Hession said Twitch tried to create "a safe environment" but was limited in how much it could do to help. It can't, for example, give out identifying information about a potential harasser unless the company receives a valid request from law enforcement. The team at Twitch responsible for corresponding with law enforcement and informing it about threats made on the platform has quadrupled in the last two years.
Last year, the company announced it would begin holding users accountable for misbehaviour that occurred "off-service," saying it was a novel approach for the industry. If a Twitch user is determined to have committed "egregious real-world harm," according to the company, the user can be barred from the platform.
Twitch has to walk a fine line between keeping streamers safe from unruly fans and encouraging the kind of interaction that powers the platform and makes money, said Mia Consalvo, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal who studies video games and Twitch.
"They want to shut down the most egregious harassment, because that's going to drive people away from the stream and the channel. But they don't want to crack down too much, because they don't want to drive away too many people, too many viewers," Consalvo said.
In 2020, Twitch expanded its definition of hateful conduct and acknowledged that some creators, especially minorities, "experience a disproportionate amount of harassment and abuse online." Last summer, the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter began circulating on social media after Black and LGBTQ streamers said they were being targeted by so-called hate raids, in which automated bot accounts spammed their chats with racist and discriminatory epithets.
Twitch said it had improved its moderation programs in response, including adding better automated tools to detect malicious bots. But streamers say they themselves — and their moderation teams — are still largely responsible for ensuring that viewers follow the site's rules.
Klint Harlin, who streams to more than 4,000 followers on his TerribleGaming123 Twitch channel, dealt with a handful of racist hate raids last year. Then, Harlin, who is Black, was swatted. Police officers showed up at his home in Detroit last month and handcuffed him while they checked to make sure the report of violence at his residence was false.
"You can get someone killed doing this," Harlin, 36, said. "To me, this is attempted murder."
He said he thought Twitch was doing its best to keep streamers safe, but wanted more transparency about the platform's efforts and support for streamers of color.
"A lot of the time, we just feel alone," Harlin said.
A surreal world
A YouTube video viewed over 1 million times addresses the problem directly: "How can I stop my stalker? Please help."
A popular Twitch streamer known as Sweet Anita, 31, made the video in 2020 after she said a fan showed up repeatedly at her house, at one point with a knife. In it, she talks about her experiences and interviews other Twitch streamers about harassment.
Some streamers do not acknowledge stalking episodes, for fear of making them worse. But others discuss the harassment openly, the costs of their streaming becoming yet another part of life they share with their audience.
Sweet Anita, who asked to be identified only by her alias for safety reasons, said many streamers made a fake wall or hung a cloth behind them to prevent fans from identifying distinctive features in their home that could be matched to Zillow photos or rental listings.
"Disguise your home. Don't do house tours," she said. "They'll find you."
Despite the precautions she has to take, Sweet Anita said she did not regret going into streaming.
"I laugh every day. I get paid to play video games," she said. "It's a surreal world."
Nor does Siragusa second-guess her career choice. After six years on Twitch she remains matter-of-fact about the harassment that has escalated to the point where an Estonian man showed up at her house. It's an unfortunate reality, she said, of being a woman online.
"I guess you do get used to it — it comes with the territory," she said. "It shouldn't."
She is expanding her repertoire, though, she said, from the "e-girl genre" ("a pretty girl doing random stuff on stream") into more mainstream topics, like hosting game shows. She is also starting a management company for streamers.
And she dreams of one day starting a sanctuary for rescue dogs and horses. The animals would be livestreamed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kellen Browning and Kashmir Hill
Photographs by: Go Nakamura and Bryan Schutmaat
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES