Profitable Addictainment: The Mediatized Cocktail of Entertainment, Hate Speech, and Radicalization on Kick

The research investigates the case of new online livestreaming platform Kick, owned by recent rapidly growing crypto-gambling company Stake. The project demonstrates how livestreaming platforms are capitalizing on the role of entertainment and the rise of hypervisible gambling content online. Investigating how hate speech and hegemonic ideologies get constructed, consumed, and circulated on an online platform by creators and users through the consumable object of entertainment—highlighting the controversial and deeply neoliberal profit-driven practices of digital labor by creators and audiences. Entertainment, which always occupies a dominating ideological place within media structures (Postman, 1985; Frith, 1999; Sun, 2002; Han, 2019). The role of entertainment is investigated to show how entertainment deprives a ‘regular’ form of consumption—analyzing how intersections of entertainment, hate speech, and gambling converge into the roofied cocktail of uniquely damaging content—one which becomes salient in the profit-making cycle of the platformed entertainment in the digital culture and economy.
The research utilizes the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), which involves documentation of the affordances of the app to investigate forms of habitual consumption and ideal users. The methodology is used to identify Kick’s operating model, platform governance, vision, and context that form an understanding of the ideal users and practices of the platform. I argue that Kick’s unique milieu exerts an alienating and addictive effect on its users through the mix of hateful radicalized discourse and hyper-visible hardcore gambling content, constituting a specific form of entertainment. A vicarious and violent form of entertainment—Addictainment.