Some Twitch users in 2020 petitioned for Twitch to remove Ryan Gutierrez as the face of the PogChamp emote, following numerous claims of Gutierrez promoting far-right conspiracies, such as
anti-vaccination conspiracies, and spreading
misinformation and denial of
COVID-19. On January 6, 2021, Twitch announced that they would remove the original PogChamp emote following comments from Gutierrez on his
Twitter page supporting further civil unrest in response to the
death of a participant in the
United States Capitol attack occurring that day. Gutierrez responded to the removal of the original PogChamp critically several weeks after the removal date, stating rhetorically at social media companies sifting through his posts to allow them to judge any negative intent about himself as a person. "They're looking for people that are trying to incite violence, but that's not what they found on my account. [...] So, why is it then, that Twitch seems to have decision making super powers? Because in less than three hours from when I uploaded the video, they made the decision to remove PogChamp as a global emote." FrankerFaceZ, a popular web browser extension for Twitch featuring custom emotes, took the decision to ban all user-upload instances and variations of Gutierrez. Another similar extension named BTTV (Better Twitch TV) announced that their platform would continue hosting PogChamp-related emotes, allowing broadcasters to use their own discretion of whether they would like the emote in their chats.
The Verge describes the removal of PogChamp as part of Twitch's move towards becoming more mainstream by detaching themselves from hateful behavior in the gaming community. Instead of using Ryan Gutierrez's face, a different streamer was used as the face of the PogChamp emote each 24 hours, starting from January 8, 2021. Although members of the Twitch community praised the diverse inclusion of various streamers, specifically those from
minorities, some concern was raised by members of minority communities over Twitch doing too little to protect streamers from harassment. The first instance of the PogChamp emote not using a living person reused an existing Twitch emote, "KomodoHype", a depiction of a
komodo dragon with a similar facial expression to the PogChamp emote. This resulted in fewer negative reactions. KomodoHype, which was previously less popular than PogChamp, has seen a significant increase in usage since the removal of the original emote. There were two poll options: the face of American Twitch livestreamer UmiNoKaiju, and the existing KomodoHype emote. KomodoHype won with 81% of the votes, and PogChamp was permanently replaced with it. The original KomodoHype emote was kept, which left two different emotes with different names and duplicate images.
Drag queen Deere experienced similar trolling incidents due to negative reception posted on
Twitter and
Reddit about her depiction of the PogChamp emote, although with simultaneous support for her too. == References ==