The rioters in Washington D.C. used a number of social media tools to livestream their January 6 assault on the Capitol, including Facebook and Instagram Live. However, the small U.S.-based video streaming platform DLive also rose to prominence when the white nationalist Tim Gionet, also known as Baked Alaska, used it to broadcast his breach of the building to 16,000 followers. 

DLive, a relatively modest live streaming platform launched in 2017, with seven million users, has been embraced by other white supremacist and far-right figures, including the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whose account was permanently disabled after the riot for "inciting violent and illegal activities." Gionet was also banned from the platform on January 8.

The gaming platform quickly distanced itself from the unprecedented events at the Capitol. “DLive does not condone illegal activities or violence,” read a posting on its official Twitter account, made hours after the insurrection. On January 8, the company said it had suspended, forced offline or limited 10 accounts and deleted 100 broadcasts and frozen the earnings of individuals streaming the riot.

Megan Squire, an extremism researcher and computer scientist at Elon University in North Carolina studied donations on DLive between April 2020 and January 2021. She found that extremists had earned up to $90,000 in less than a year by streaming their content to subscribers.