Political Influencers Are Ramping Up Security—and Posting Through It

As news broke that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event on a college campus last week, Hasan Piker’s Twitch chat was spiraling. Messages flooded onto the streamer’s channel. “Disavow quickly and vehemently for your own safety,” one chatter urged. “Pleeeeeeaaaase don’t do public debates anymore,” begged another.

Piker, one of the most prominent progressive creators online, was set to face Kirk in a live debate at Dartmouth University on September 25. Now, still on air with new details about the killing flowing in by the minute, Piker was openly weighing what it meant for his own work as well. “I go out to public settings like this all the time. So there’s a level of closeness in that regard because of the nature of what I do,” Piker told his viewers. “I have a policy of not living in fear, but we’ll see. I might have to reconfigure certain things.”