It’s got to be much more common for streamers because they’re expected to have some minimal level of interaction with their viewers. For the kind of guy who would do this, having a woman say hello to him is a big deal. Opening yourself up even in such a slight way is going to dramatically increase the risk of a stalker getting attached to you.
There are more than a few actresses with their fair share of stalkers. The number of crazy ass fans that go to your home to kill you is still pretty rare for the celebrity crowd. YouTubers are celebrities.
Yeah, it’s tempting to make a joke about then being “Z-list celebrities” but that Turner person has over 300k subscribers on YouTube and her videos get between 50k-300k views. That’s not much compared to Survivor, but at her top-end it’s enough to sustain a weekly hourlong TV show on the CW.
From what I’ve gathered it’s actually not all that rare. Maybe the “actually showing up with a gun to kill/hurt you” part is fairly rare, but everything up to that point doesn’t seem to be.
I think it’s probably more common for streamers because of sheer volume of info. Odds are all your vitals are out there after you’ve streamed for several thousand hours. Youtube you can more easily control what gets out. If your friend says your name, you can edit that out. If you mention where you live, again, you can edit it out. On a stream those things happen live and everyone knows instantly and you can’t really take it back. Plus that massive amount of interaction is more likely to draw the attention of the stalkers I would imagine. I would imagine they think they “know” their targets more than most because of all that time.
Gavin Free is one of the Slo-Mo guys. My kids and I have watched tons of their goofball, HD, Slo-Mo videos. They’ve got over 10 Million subscribers.
Sure, but he has a Y chromosome. The stalker was after his girlfriend.
I agree with this, as well as what Miguk said about interaction. There’s a certain pseudo-intimacy that can develop if you spend 8 hours every day sitting alone in your house watching and interacting with one person.
And I think most streamers are not making the same money as movie/tv celebrities, who can afford the best personal security money can buy.
Here is the story in the Wichita Eagle:
http://amp.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article194441604.html
I’d love to see stats. I think it’s pretty rare. We have celebs that live here. Everyone knows where they live, and no one bothers them. It’s not lack of information that’s rare so much as the rarity of a fan or predator crossing that line. Celebs are not exactly super rare citings or anything. They still have a higher chance of being hit by a car than being killed by a deranged fan.
Also, everyone knows exactly when you’re at home.
WingsOfDeath, a League of Legends streamer, was swatted yesterday.
Listening to him talk about it on stream a while ago, it sounds like the Cops had doubts about it being legit. They didn’t kick any doors in, they knocked and talked to him. They looked around the place (inside and out) but that was it. Nothing captured on stream.
We’ve been having Active Shooter training where I work at a university, and I very nearly asked the cop leading part of one session what he thought about swatting and if he felt it might creep into higher ed. I decided not to, figuring it’d just come off as a weird question. A few days later it (sort of) actually happened here (bomb threat in a webform communication), but fortunately it did not result in any actual violence. Someone, we don’t know who, used the webform to identify him or herself as some blameless student and the student was almost immediately contacted by the university authorities and the local police about it. That student is now off the hook and all the info (IP addresses, etc.) was handed over to our security team and the police for further investigation.
Unrelated, but there was also an annoying moment when a presenter talked about video games and their role in all this stuff, and I was not the only one in the room to be annoyed by how out-of-date and misinformed some of that was.
We just got the notification where I work that there is now mandatory training for this too. I look forward to the video. During on-boarding, they had a security officer come in and tell us what to do too, sort of.
Strangely, we’ve had this as well, and I work for a manufacturing company. We even have safe rooms that have been set up with locks, steel on the backside of the doors and a heavy duty peephole to validate who is on the other side.
It was a bit scary when they did all this, as apparently they chose our location as the first one to be done in the company.
So Sky news was able to talk to the criminal but the police haven’t caught up with him yet?
So this isn’t swatting, but this seemed an appropriate thread for this:
Someone shot at Twitch streamer DrDisrespect’s house. (video from stream at link)
I like DrDisrespect, he’s a really funny, entertaining streamer. He’s one of the few streamers who makes the effort to create a persona and never deviates from it… except in extreme circumstances.
He’s not perfect, he had some drama awhile back when he admitted, crying on stream, that he had cheated on his wife and wouldn’t be streaming for awhile. He took several months off to repair his marriage (He also has a young daughter) then returned to streaming.
I won’t make excuses for his infidelity, but that’s between him and his family, and they seem to have worked it out. Regardless, he doesn’t deserve to be shot at. And it was apparently the second day in a row this happened.
This is the second time?! Dear lord. That’s messed up.
who would do this… its so twisted! just a streamer and has a young daughter