It’s no secret that if you’re successful online, you will be met by trolls who would try to get in your head. And it gets worse for females due to sexism on the internet. But how far would you go to block those who try to rile up your feathers or send weird and creepy messages? Turns out, Pokimane was able to solve this issue by hiring people to block them off her social media.
During one of her Just Chatting live streams on Twitch, Pokimane revealed that she doesn’t block people on Twitter personally. The Twitch streamer has people on her account blocking those who she claimed are “saying weird shit” online. She also laughed, knowing that she’d see a post that says “omg Pokimane blocked me,” she 100 percent knows that it wasn’t her and nobody knows until now.
There is nothing wrong with content moderation. After all, big tech companies use third-party services from other countries to filter out content and check if what was posted breaks the site’s terms of service. But what about individual users? Sure, there are content managers, especially for big publications, but they mostly just turn off comments or ignore them outright. To see a huge streamer create jobs to filter out certain conversations is an interesting power move.
The clip made its way to Reddit and people noticed that what Pokimane did is similar to events that happened in South Park. In the season 19 episode titled ‘Safe Space,’ Cartman took advice from the principal and hired Butters to filter out negative comments. Butters describes the job as “pretty brutal” since he has to filter out all the negativity.
While people noticed the similarities, some believe what Pokimane did is justified. Female streamers and influencers tend to get harassed more often compared to male streamers. They’d receive harmful or creepy messages, get catcalled, have unsolicited images sent, get body shamed, or other forms of insults that affect mental health. So having someone filter out the hateful and “creepy” comments could be seen as a good thing, especially for a huge streamer like Pokimane,
Unfortunately, there will be people out there who would see something like this as “censorship” and it goes against “freedom of speech.” But there is a fine line between not having your belief heard and calling someone a “slut” because they didn’t reply to your messages. While this is something that not everyone can afford, Pokimane is very likely to be in a financial position where she could afford people to filter out negativity and harassment.