American Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez almost broke a Twitch record by playing Among Us. The game about cooperation and deception is hugely popular right now, as is Ocasio-Cortez. She instigated the event bij sending out a Tweet, asking if people wanted to play with her. None other than Pokimane, by far the most popular female Twitch streamer, joined in.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plays Among Us on Twitch
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – affectionately called AOC by her supporters – booted up Among Us and streamed it on Twitch yesterday. While the game sure is fun, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t do it just to smoke out the imposter from the team. She also did it to get people to vote come Presidential elections. And the politician was presumably quite successful at that, because the stream almost broke the record of most watched stream on Twitch.
Record breaking stream
According to internet culture expert Rod Berslau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Among Us stream peaked at almost 440k viewers on Twitch. That actually makes it the third highest viewed by an individual streamer in Twitch history.
correction: AOC's debut stream has now peaked at 439,000 viewers, making it the third highest individual stream by viewership in Twitch history, only behind the Ninja/Drake collab (628k) and shroud's return (500k)
the newest streaming superstar has arrived
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) October 21, 2020
Some viewers criticized AOC for politicizing Twitch and the following of streamers like Pokimane. Similarly, we’ve previously questioned politics mixing with video games too. Her debut, however, was quite lighthearted an more importantly, the Democratic representative was pretty clear about her intentions of mobilizing voters.
We have the ability to vote Trump out of office, to vote for a Biden-Kamala ticket. Let’s make sure we change this country.
AOC is part of a bigger trend of politicians using modern day media to get a message across. For example, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders entered the realm of gamers to get support. None of those attempts were quite as entertaining as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Twitch debut with Among Us though!
Image credit: Twitch