As new technologies rapidly reshape patterns of political communication, platforms like Twitch are transforming how people consume political information. This entertainment-oriented live streaming platform allows us to observe the impact of technologies such as ``live-streaming'' and ``streaming-chat'' on political communication. Despite its entertainment focus, Twitch hosts a variety of political actors, including politicians and pundits. This study explores Twitch politics by addressing three main questions: 1) Who are the political Twitch streamers? 2) What content is covered in political streams? 3) How do audiences of political streams interact with each other? To identify political streamers, I leveraged the Twitch API and supervised machine-learning techniques, identifying 574 political streamers. I used topic modeling to analyze the content of political streams, revealing seven broad categories of political topics and a unique pattern of communication involving context-specific ``emotes.'' Additionally, I created user-reference networks to examine interaction patterns, finding that a small number of users dominate the communication network. This research contributes to our understanding of how new social media technologies influence political communication, particularly among younger audiences.

翻译：随着新技术迅速重塑政治传播模式，Twitch等平台正在改变人们消费政治信息的方式。这个以娱乐为导向的直播平台使我们能够观察“直播流”和“流媒体聊天”等技术对政治传播的影响。尽管以娱乐为主，Twitch仍容纳了包括政治人物和评论员在内的各类政治行为者。本研究通过探讨三个核心问题来考察Twitch政治生态：1）Twitch政治主播是谁？2）政治直播涵盖哪些内容？3）政治直播观众之间如何互动？为识别政治主播，我利用Twitch API和监督机器学习技术，识别出574名政治主播。通过主题建模分析政治直播内容，揭示了七大类政治话题主题，以及一种涉及情境特定“表情符号”的独特传播模式。此外，我构建了用户引用网络来考察互动模式，发现少数用户在传播网络中占据主导地位。本研究有助于我们理解新兴社交媒体技术如何影响政治传播，特别是在年轻受众群体中的传播机制。