Last June the gaming industry had a moment of reckoning. Starting as a trickle, female and non-binary online gamers and streamers began posting stories of online and offline harassment by men, a problem they said was rife across the industry. 

Accusations of misogynistic comments, threats of rape, revenge porn and doxxing spread to other social media platforms, not just the ones centered on gaming. From YouTube to Twitter and Reddit, big-name content creators — almost exclusively male — were getting away with creating online worlds that amplified the harassment women have fought for decades to eradicate from their workplace.

That online platforms function as workplaces for content creators and that harassment and abuse threaten their livelihoods is rarely addressed in discussions on platform regulation and the industry’s self-policing policies. Many of the users involved are financially dependent on ad revenue from their online streams or posts, making these platforms essentially their place of business.

“In a normal workplace if your employees are getting harassed this way, you would do something,” said Karen Skardzius, who researches Twitch streamers and platform regulation at York University in Toronto. “If this was a store and you had someone come in and scream all these expletives and hateful language at one of your employees, you would chuck them out of the store. But instead, here, that’s engagement with the platform.”