If you arrive at TwitchCon 2025 on the San Diego Conference Heart, you are instantly met with tight safety. Luggage are checked, backpacks are prohibited, and everybody passes by metallic detectors. To entry completely different areas inside, attendees should scan their wristbands — however these usually malfunction, and safety not often makes exceptions.
With such a visual safety presence, you’d suppose creators would really feel secure. They do not — and for good motive.
Emiru, a YouTuber and Twitch streamer with almost two million followers, was assaulted at a meet-and-greet on the primary day of TwitchCon. And, regardless of Twitch saying time and time once more that “security and safety” is its “highest precedence,” she was left feeling “damage and upset by how Twitch dealt with it throughout and after the actual fact.”
“I do not perceive how he was allowed to make it to me within the first place,” Emiru wrote in a prolonged put up on X.
This Tweet is at the moment unavailable. It may be loading or has been eliminated.
In a video posted to X, a person approached Emiru, grabbed her, and tried to kiss her. She pushed them away earlier than safety intervened and pulled them away by the arm. Emiru says that safety was her private safety, not a member of the TwitchCon safety crew. She stated there have been three or 4 TwitchCon safety workers close by “who didn’t react and let the man stroll away.”
“The girl who’s strolling me away is my very own private supervisor, and behind the sales space, the one two individuals who had been checking on me and comforting me had been her and my pal. Not one of the TwitchCon workers got here to ask what occurred or if I used to be okay,” she wrote in her put up.
Mashable Pattern Report
After the video circulated broadly on social media, Twitch wrote in an announcement on X that it “instantly blocked this particular person from returning to the TwitchCon premises, and they’re banned indefinitely from Twitch, each on-line and in-person occasions.” Emiru wrote that it is a “blatant lie.”
“He was allowed to stroll away from my meet and greet, and I did not hear he was caught till hours after he attacked me, and it felt like this solely occurred due to my supervisor urgent for it, not as a result of TwitchCon workers current thought it was a giant deal,” she wrote.
Twitch didn’t instantly reply to Mashable’s request for touch upon the conflicting accounts.
Emiru additionally famous that this incident follows TwitchCon’s earlier banning of her “favourite and normal safety guard” for “holding a stalker’s arm to carry him to police” at a previous occasion.
Now, she says this might be her ultimate TwitchCon, and she or he inspired others to not attend sooner or later.
“I didn’t really feel cared for or protected, even bringing my very own safety and workers,” she wrote. “I can not think about how creators with out these choices would really feel.”
This isn’t the primary time TwitchCon has been criticized for safety considerations. In 2024, a number of Kick-affiliated streamers disrupted the occasion, harassing Twitch-affiliated creators on-site. This yr, main streamers, together with Valkyrae, QTCinderella, Hasan Piker, Disguised Toast, and Yvonnie, publicly introduced they’d not attend as a consequence of security considerations.
Extra reporting by Crystal Bell.
