Could Twitch streamers really unionize?

polygon.com:

Twitch has had a tumultuous couple of weeks. The company faced intense scrutiny over its gambling policies, and on Sept. 20, Twitch announced it would prohibit some types of gambling on the platform in October. Later that week, a Bloomberg report exposed child predation on the site. And on that very same day, Twitch introduced a wildly unpopular change to how much its streamers get paid. The collision of all these problems at once reached a fever pitch — and had some streamers asking, Could we really unionize?

With regard to the revenue split, The Verge reported that larger and smaller content creators alike see it as “anti-creator.” Twitch currently offers a 70/30 revenue split to its top streamers, and others have long asked for the platform to spread that to all streamers rather than the 50/50 split it currently offers them. Instead, Twitch is actually moving away from that split, bringing all streamers down to a 50/50 split after they’ve reached $100,000 in revenue.

The reality is that streamers already have been organizing. Though streamers likely can’t unionize in the legal sense like workers at a company or factory might, they are nonetheless able to work together and even use collective action to encourage Twitch to make changes.

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Twitch streamers already understand the shared power they hold over the platform they use. While streamers haven’t ever actually organized themselves into an unofficial union or guild, they have rallied together to push for change on the platform. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Before Twitch’s top streamers called on the Amazon-owned company to ban slots and gambling on the platform — led by a hashtag and a proposed boycott — a number of streamers had done the