Beefed Up TwitchCon Security Couldn’t Stop The Internet’s Issues From Spilling Over Into Real Life

TwitchCon, which took place last weekend in San Diego, California, is an overlapping series of cacaphonies. A quick stroll down the show floor reveals a hodgepodge of advertisers like State Farm, booths dedicated to high-profile games like Resident Evil, The Sims, and Minecraft, a tabletop section, a music stage Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has been known to perform on, and eventually, an esports arena. There are also panels in various rooms, as well as an artist alley like you’d find at Comic-Con or an anime convention. But these are all distractions. The real main event – the reason people spend hundreds of dollars to attend – is the streamers. 

Despite all the aforementioned sights and sounds, one scene defined TwitchCon 2025. During a meet and greet on Friday, Emily “Emiru” Schunk was approached by a man who proceeded to grab ahold of her and attempted to forcibly kiss her. Schunk’s personal security guard quickly intervened and pushed the assailant away, but after that he was reportedly allowed to roam free. Schunk, rattled, resumed her meet and greet, but the next day she declared that she’ll never return to TwitchCon.

“Thank you guys again, sorry you all had to see that,” she wrote on Twitter. “This is definitely my last TwitchCon, and it saddens me to say as a 10-year off and on attendee of TwitchCon. I think other creators should seriously consider not attending in the future. I did not feel cared for or protected, even bringing my own security and staff. I can't imagine how creators without those options would feel. … [The assailant] was allowed to walk away from my meet and greet, and I didn't hear he was caught until hours after he attacked me, and it felt like this only happened because of my manager pressing for it, not because TwitchCon staff present thought it was a big deal.” 

Prior to TwitchCon, a slew of high-profile streamers including Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt, Rachell “Valkyrae” Hoffstetter, and QTCinderella dropped out in advance of the event, citing the current political climate. The latter two also pointed to instances of violence against female streamers in public – Hoffstetter and Schunk were both attacked on stream at the Santa Monica Pier earlier this year – and the March 2025 murder of Japanese content creator Airi Sato. 

One streamer to whom Aftermath spoke, Denims, was planning to attend the show, but changed her mind a few days prior.

“To be honest, I just don’t feel like TwitchCon is what it used to be, both in terms of more general vibes, but also in the effort that Twitch puts in,” Denims told Aftermath. “After my experience last year, where I got banned for participating in a panel that was supposedly preapproved by Twitch, I had concerns about diligence on behalf of Twitch staff. Seeing the laxity that allowed Emiru to get assaulted in such a terrifying way only confirmed to me that Twitch doesn't allocate enough resources to TwitchCon, and that the organizers are stretched thin enough that they don’t seem to even know what’s happening at their event. This is unsurprising to anyone that has been to a TwitchCon before, but in the face of the current political climate in the United States, I think the negligence is unacceptable.” 

In response to streamers’ concerns leading up to this year’s event, Twitch promised “robust security measures” including “screening procedures at all entry points and rigorous access control protocols,” a variety of security personnel including armed police officers, and a command center focused on monitoring and protecting the venue. This varied from prior events, which featured metal detectors and guards, but not quite so many. The command center also appeared to be new, especially in terms of how it was monitoring the event – pulling footage from hundreds of IRL streamers (almost certainly more than were present in previous years). 

This year’s measures did not successfully deter Schunk’s assailant, however. Following the assault, Twitch published another statement:

“In line with existing TwitchCon security protocols, law enforcement and event security were on site and responded to the incident,” the company wrote on Twitter the day after the attack. “We immediately blocked this individual from returning to the TwitchCon premises, and they are banned indefinitely from Twitch, both online and in-person events. We are coordinating with the impacted creator’s team and, per our standard protocols, continue to cooperate with any law enforcement investigations. We have increased security at the Meet & Greet attendee check-in point and will have additional security personnel surrounding participating streamers. … Twitch has zero tolerance for harassment or acts that inhibit the safety and security of our community.”

Speaking with User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy put things in slightly more personal terms, as tends to be his way for better or worse.

“We’re looking very closely at everything that happened there, and I care deeply about Emi,” Clancy said. “She’s a friend of mine, and so I want to see how we can support her. This is just something we have to keep working on. I think everyone identifies our tools in terms of trust and safety as the leaders in the industry about helping creators, but that means there's always more work to be done, because that's the world we live in now."

Aftermath reached out to Twitch for additional information, but did not receive a reply as of this publishing. 

Over the course of the weekend, a handful of other streamers came forward with stories and clips of harassment at and around TwitchCon. In another case that caught the attention of the wider content creation community, a streamer named Emerome was approached by N3on, a notorious shit-stirring IRL streamer more frequently associated with Kick than Twitch, who invited her to a party entirely on the basis that she was “very beautiful” and then, when she sarcastically replied that she loves being objectified and walked away, started screaming that her friend was fat. It should be noted that N3on did not simply buy a ticket to TwitchCon and show up; Twitch featured him and gave him his own meet and greet.

On another occasion, Jack Doherty – who, like N3on, loves to shove cameras in people’s faces and provoke them until they lash out, but who was banned from Kick after crashing a McLaren while looking at his phone, then unbanned, and then banned again a few days later for getting into a street fight – repeatedly shouted the f-slur at a PeachJars, a popular Twitch streamer, after she suggested, correctly, that Doherty is a homophobe. 

Clips like these have led many in the Twitch community to decry both TwitchCon security and Twitch as a company and platform. Content creators like Hoyt, Ethan Klein, and John “Tectone” Robertson, absolutely part of the problem, used these incidents as an opportunity to pretend like they care about women – as well as safety or anything else beyond whatever drama of the day gets them views and allows them to go after perceived enemies – while Twitch mainstays like Ben “Cohh Carnage” Cassell and Devin Nash have advocated for Twitch or a new platform like it to implement a strict games-only policy, to eliminate IRL streaming. There were also calls for Twitch to eliminate politics, even though the category is not really directly relevant to anything that happened at TwitchCon (Hoyt, again part of the problem, concurred with Cassell here; hmmm, wonder why). 

But these are alluringly simple solutions to a host of complex problems, the kind that play well online but don’t really hold up under scrutiny. For one, the most viewed clips from TwitchCon are illustrative of two related but different problems: 1) Obvious security concerns around streamers’ physical safety, and 2) IRL streamers farming for salacious moments, a type of stream that doesn’t necessarily perform well on Twitch but does lead to engagement in the algorithmic short-form clip slurry that is YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. The latter is a gray area. The former is a can of worms so full-to-bursting that I’d recommend taking cover. 

Secure, But Not Always Safe

Many have made the claim that there was no security at TwitchCon – that, for example, if Schunk’s assailant had decided to bring a knife, it would have been game over for her. But to even enter the convention center, attendees had to pass through a metal detector and bag check, and security was posted up around entrances and exits, on the show floor, next to escalators, and near meet and greets. 

User Mag’s Lorenz received a tour of TwitchCon’s security command center, images from which Aftermath has viewed. The setup included a series of monitors cycling through hundreds of attendees’ streams (with handles attached for identification purposes), as well as more traditional security footage – all of which was monitored by dozens of security staff. This probably-unintentional Dark Knight homage, Lorenz told Aftermath, allowed for “mass surveillance” of the event. Compared to other events she’s attended like Vidcon, which also plays host to creators with millions of followers, she found it to be a more sophisticated security apparatus. 

Despite security discourse from big streamers, only some of whom were at TwitchCon, general Twitter sentiment around the show skewed more positive than negative, according to resident Twitch newsman Zach Bussey. 

Streamers to whom Aftermath spoke reported a relatively incident-free weekend.

“I had no [security] concerns [with attendees],” Tanya “Cypheroftyr” DePass, who previously dealt with stalker-related issues on Twitch, told Aftermath. “Someone I’ve had an issue with at PAX East was spotted but did not engage. I didn’t hear about Emiru until after it had happened.”

“I felt safe, but luckily I’m a man,” ConnorEatsPants, whose Fortnite Friday interview show has recently attracted high-profile guests like Gavin Newsom and The Rizzler, told Aftermath. “There’s always a few ‘weird’ people, but mostly just awkward folks. Past two years, I had issues with Twitch not clearing me for proper security assistance, which had led to some issues with me walking the floor and getting swarmed. Luckily this year I was cleared in advance, thankfully.”   

Twitch also maintained a special Purple Lounge exclusively for “premium partners” – aka, those with high view counts – that they could access without ever exposing themselves to the hopefully-washed masses.

"I could go from my [hotel] room to events without ever encountering any floor time,” politics streamer Michael “MikeFromPA” Beyer, who is no stranger to the kinds of politically motivated death threats that made Twitch especially squeamish this year, told Aftermath. “So I could go through a utility elevator in the hotel, get into a black Suburban, be taken [to the convention center], and go to the Purple Lounge, which is behind two layers of security as well – former police, military, bodyguards, etc."

Beyer said that months before the event, Twitch told him it would not provide security details for individuals, but that there’d be “an opportunity to bring your own security if you feel you’d need it.” However, the company seemed to have changed its tune following Charlie Kirk’s death, as it did provide a security guard for entertainment and politics streamer Caroline Kwan, who received death threats prior to the show over her defense of Piker during the ludicrous CollarGate scandal, including one about how somebody wanted to “Charlie Kirk” her “so bad.” Big Twitch streamers have partner managers, not all of whom are cut from the same cloth, but Kwan says hers spearheaded the effort to make sure she was safe.

“I had a security person [thanks to my partner manager],” Kwan told Aftermath. “They were [Twitch owner] Amazon security; it was not a temporary TwitchCon security officer, like people they hired just for the weekend. And then after the Emiru situation, my partner manager reached out to me and was like 'If you don't want to do your meet and greet anymore, no problem.' ... She was very communicative.”

But Kwan recognizes that she’s in a unique position among TwitchCon attendees.

"My personal experience this weekend, I did feel secure, but I know that wasn't everyone's,” she said. “I talked to a lot of people, especially women, and the vibes were just that everyone was furious – female streamers saying that they weren’t hanging out in the [convention center] at all. People would be in the Purple Lounge or do their shows, and that was it."

Kwan also noted that big streamers like Schunk spend upwards of $10,000 per year on personal security. Smaller streamers can’t necessarily afford that. 

Kwan also said she heard stories of backstage locations – where big names sought refuge – being inconsistently guarded, while other streamers spoke of needlessly strict security protocols at less crucial junctures. The latter caused some streamers accessibility issues – on top of the event’s preexisting and at this point notorious accessibility issues – by, in one case, taking a bag away from a person with diabetes and multiple sclerosis and forcing them to carry blood-sugar-regulating snacks in their hands. In other cases, creators who’ve striven to keep their IRL identities secret for privacy purposes and chronically ill people were forced to remove masks and show their faces in public.

DePass was irked by security she described as “inconsistent joke theater.”

"Despite the 'no backpack' rule, I saw people admitted with backpacks, and I was given a hassle for my small bag,” she said. “My [Magic The Gathering] mat was unrolled by a security officer on entry on Sunday despite it being design-side out. His explanation? Sometimes people have lewd or inappropriate designs on these. Like, pornography. My mat had a Chocobo, which he could see without having to touch it or unroll it."

Therein lies the problem with calls for more security at the convention. Twitch hired numerous security guards who ostensibly did their jobs, but in some streamers’ experiences were neither consistent nor useful. They accosted and irritated attendees; they did not immediately pursue Schunk’s assailant, as they should have. In the same way that overfunding police does not solve crime, throwing more dudes in uniforms at a convention full of famous people and their parasocial fans does not guarantee safety. Twitch surely knew its security would be under scrutiny due to issues raised before the event. But a performance intended to satisfy an audience that equates scale and spectacle with quality is very different from a targeted, effective operation that considers the unique needs of a one-of-a-kind event.

IRL Ire

Which brings us to the IRL streamer issue. These opportunists did not generally pose a physical threat, but some bothered attendees and caused them – most of them women – to feel unsafe. Emerome, for example, said she began receiving death threats online after the clip of her shrugging off N3on went viral, and as a result she decided to skip the remainder of the con. Many IRL streamers attended an outdoor block party Twitch hosted and roamed streets near the convention center, ravenous for content. This contributed to a general sense of anxiety and unrest. 

"[The block party] was chum for these IRL streamer sharks to go in and try to farm these moments,” said Kwan. “When [my team and I] looked outside [from the restaurant we were eating at], it was just all these cameras and lights, and you could see obnoxious streamers on the hunt. ... A lot of people who went to [the block party] were like 'You know what? It was just not fun. I felt like everywhere I went, there were just cameras being shoved in my face.'"

Twitch could not have prevented all of this; the outdoors and parties hosted by other orgs, of which there were many, are not the company’s purview. But at least on convention grounds, it did possess the means to do so. The problem is that Twitch had security personnel monitoring hundreds of streams for more traditional security concerns (physical safety, etc), but it evidently didn’t consider the IRL streamers themselves to be a potentially serious security issue. Guards did not intervene when people like N3on and Doherty made people uncomfortable (though Doherty’s Twitch account was suspended sometime in the past few days).

The question then becomes: Is that something Twitch wants to curtail in the future? TwitchCon has become a hotbed for content creation, and preventing online conflict and misogyny from spilling over into real life might require a cultural intervention as much, if not more than, a security one, the kind that would necessarily involve giving the boot to big-name creators with misogynistic tendencies. 

"The truth is, TwitchCon was probably the most surveilled, security rich, and filmed event in the [San Diego] convention center all year," Bret "Cinemarxism" Hamilton said on Twitter. "Surveillance and buff dudes just don’t prevent cultural issues like misogyny from causing harm to vulnerable people. Could more be done? Of course. I wish harassment and misogyny [were] taken 100x more seriously by the platform, but the problems that actually cause these people to behave this way are so deep and wider in scope than the platform of Twitch. As evidenced by this weekend, cops, surveillance and other forms of security theater can’t and don’t actually keep us safe. Only we keep us safe, and a lot of us are not doing nearly enough to counter misogyny and online harassment."

"A lot of male streamers participate in [the culture of misogyny] without maybe understanding that this is all part of a larger problem,” said Kwan. “They go 'Well, I would never assault a woman or say that was OK. And in fact, I'm condemning what happened to Emiru, and if I were there, I would have protected her.' ... When we call women whores, when we say these really misogynistic things and normalize it, and then we have these audiences comprised of very impressionable, vulnerable young men who are learning from this, not every one of them is going to do something like the guy did to Emiru, but it's all part of a broader systemic issue."

Some have suggested simply banning all IRL streamers from TwitchCon, but that would effectively mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

“I’ve been on Twitch as a viewer for 15+ years," Jakenbake, an OG IRL streamer who made his name by exploring Japan with his viewers, said on Twitter. "I’ve seen the growth, the ups and downs, streamers come, streamers go, and an ever evolving community. I’ve witnessed the diversification of content into non-gaming 'IRL' since the inception. Seeing all of the understandable frustration with TwitchCon and IRL streamers this year definitely hurts as it lumps in everyone in an already hard to navigate category. ... I understand the frustrations completely because I have them too. [Of course] this isn’t everyone, and there’s tons of amazing creators doing things properly." 

Clip That

This is where calls to eliminate IRL streamers entirely – either from the convention or Twitch as a platform – begin to ring hollow. Painting with too broad a brush blots out those who just want to bring viewers along for a ride. The medium is not intrinsically the problem, nor in this case is Twitch. 

“Jack Doherty had 300 viewers [on Twitch] during [the livestream that produced] the clip where PeachJars and him got into it,” said Kwan. “Do you think he’s farming that stuff because he’s doing so specifically for a livestream? No. That’s this whole meta of clip farming. That’s the kind of stuff that pops on other platforms: that short-form content.”

What we’re experiencing is the logical endpoint of other, much more algorithmic platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter prioritizing dramatic, controversial, and generally negative clips – the kind that generate engagement by making people mad. Platforms have been doing this for a few years now, but we’ve reached the apotheosis of the form. Creators, who’ve optimized their content to appeal to algorithms, have transformed themselves into vessels for the sort of smirking sociopathy that reliably reaps sweet, sweet views. They do it naturally and shamelessly. The machine is so well oiled that, at this point, slamming the brakes would be much harder than just letting it continue to plunge off a cliff.  

IRL streamers are far from the only ones leaning into this meta. Most recently, CollarGate was rooted in a similar sort of amoral cynicism and, again, was ginned up entirely via a series of out-of-context clips. Countless other online controversies and nontroversies have taken on a similar shape. TwitchCon 2025 was this terrible, multifaceted fly-eye lens applied to the outside world, as opposed to the online one. What happens when people look at IRL existence as nothing more than a staging ground for an endless feed of disingenuous clips? TwitchCon was a glimpse of the grim future that awaits us, or perhaps just another angle on the present we’re already inhabiting.

This is why calls to return Twitch to the good old days or make a new platform in 2011-era Twitch’s image are destined to fail: Whatever emerges from such an effort will still be subject to the prevailing winds of the modern internet. No platform is an island, as TwitchCon demonstrated by attracting so many creators who were primarily hoping to farm views on non-Twitch platforms. Similarly, there’d be nothing to stop someone from clipping a streamer saying something dumb or controversial on a hypothetical pure gaming platform and turning them into a lolcow. The root issue is not the kinds of content Twitch allows; it’s the behavior patterns incentivized by the platform ecosystem at large. 

Streamers who are calling for a return to Twitch’s halcyon “bleed purple” days are also falling into the same trap as conservatives: They’re harking back to a time that never actually existed. Yes, Twitch at one point required streamers to play games, but creators and fans have always argued about subjects and people they deem inappropriate for Twitch, even when those at the heart of bitter debates were operating well within the rules. Remember “boobie streamers”? 

"Kaceytron did nothing but play League of Legends, but because she was a woman doing it – and because she was wearing normal clothes that women wear with maybe a plunging neckline, but certainly nothing that you wouldn't see out on the streets walking around – she was bombarded with nonstop threats,” said Beyer. “Even if we strip away IRL streaming and we strip away non-gaming streaming, there's still going to be this culture of misogyny that is targeting creators. ... It seems like a bad idea overall to try to restrict people's content that's not in any way related to harassing people because of some sort of faux-nostalgia for a time that never existed where women were safe on the platform."

Twitch, meanwhile, is a relatively small platform – a fraction of the size of YouTube or TikTok with a vastly smaller staff (cut to the bone by layoffs) to match. As a result, a handful of bigger creators both on and off platform have proven reliably capable of hijacking and controlling conversations around it. Twitch’s major misstep, in Beyer’s eyes, has been catering to those users instead of implicitly telling them to change the channel like YouTube.

"Nobody is talking about enforcing YouTube terms of service, but if you search 'Twitch TOS' on YouTube, there's a million YouTube videos about it,” said Beyer. “It's like, well, the reason why that's happening is because Twitch is catering to these people. If Twitch just said [to streamers constantly complaining about women] ... 'As long as [women’s  streams are] not pornographic, as long as it's not illegal, fuck off,' then we might actually have the platform grow.”

ConnorEatsPants thinks Twitch would do well to listen more attentively to the people impacted by recent incidents – not its loudest rage baiters.

"In terms of what Twitch can do better, I’d say to listen to the girls," he said. "They’ve been expressing stuff like this since I began attending [TwitchCon] years and years ago. Emi’s had these issues everywhere she goes, and the last place she should have to worry about it is TwitchCon."

Show Must (?) Go On

Once upon a time, an event like TwitchCon made perfect sense; streamers have always sold themselves as more authentic and accessible than traditional celebrities. Why wouldn’t they want to chill with their fans? But now, top streamers are nearly as famous as the aforementioned celebrities, and parasociality means there’s no world in which all their fans will just be normal about it. 

What does safety at scale – both in terms of actual physical safety and peace of mind – look like when Twitch can’t tightly control everything and everyone, as one would at a more traditional celebrity appearance or meet and greet? The whole appeal of TwitchCon is the idea that a regular person could run into their favorite streamer milling about on the same plane of reality as them. If content creators are going to take advantage of that because other platforms incentivize it, does Twitch have a responsibility to rein them in on its own turf? 

There are tweaks that make sense from a common sense standpoint – some kind of physical barrier at meet and greets, a stricter screening process for IRL streamers – but how much more could Twitch be able or willing to change when the big debut of its latest, greatest security theater was a flop? Is there a point at which TwitchCon becomes such a reputational risk that the company just pulls the plug on the event entirely? 

With a growing number of popular streamers saying they won’t attend TwitchCon next year – even if they’re basing that decision on a lone, regrettably timed incident rather than more pervasive issues – something’s got to give.

"I don't know how Twitch convinces people to come back, because they announced in the lead up to this TwitchCon that they were going to be taking extra security measures,” said Kwan. “And then day one, [Schunk’s assault] happens, and they produced a poor response to it. Very reactive, not proactive. And if big streamers don't come, then they don't sell tickets."

“Because these little shitbag IRL clip farmers,” she added, “they’re not bringing in the viewership [for Twitch]. Not at all.”