In a statement to IGN from a Twitch spokesperson, the company announced, "We've made the decision to remove the PogChamp emote following statements from the face of the emote encouraging further violence after what took place in the Capitol today."The company added, "We want the sentiment and use of Pog to live on its meaning is much bigger than the person depicted or image itself and it has a big place in Twitch culture. However, we can't in good conscience continue to enable use of the image. We will work with the community to design a new emote for the most hype moments on Twitch."
I don't even know what to say. There's too many possible jokes all wanting to fire at once and it's just left me speechless
Capcom could have prevented this timeline by releasing a good game.
Getting rid of the PogChamp emoji is TEXTBOOK performative liberal nonsense.
Yeah, the face itself isn't hateful or anything, and they also only banned the one emote. All the other versions like Pog, PogU, POGGERS and WeirdChamp are still gonna be around (cus I don't think they're official twitch emotes, you need a third party browser extension for them to work iirc). It's an icon (literally lol) that's gone far beyond the original emote and its likeness, so banning it doesn't really mean anything.
I mean idk the face of the emote is like openly an infowars/q believer so if anything this kinda makes sense, I wouldn't want my company to be associated with that. I heard he still has a twitch account though so if they haven't removed that then it definitely is performative.
90% of Twitch users had no clue who this guy is. Removing the emote and the publicity around it has caused more exposure to his toxic views than leaving it up.
But like, does that mean we can justify leaving up hateful things as long as they aren't getting much attention? Ethical question, I'd say
That really depends on your definition of "hateful things." It's a picture of some guy's face. He's not doing the Nazi salute or anything like that. If we define "hateful" so loosely and association-based, then I'm shocked and amazed they still allow Pepe.
That's actually a good point, although at least with pepe the meme's creation had nothing to do with the alt right. At the risk of sounding stupid and over the top (take this as hyperbole) if there was a hitler emote it would not be ok, because it's literally the face of someone directly making horrific associations, and now imagine hitler is somehow associated with the company. Obviously it isn't as bad as that but my point is that the meme is inherently representing the guy. As a probably better example I completely agree with Microsoft's decision to scrub notch from the minecraft credits.
I have no idea who this dude is other than he’s a gamer. So unless you’re terminally online, the phrase/word was insider enough for me not to care about the Streisand effect.
My take is, they cut this dumb shit off before it became another Pepe.
