Hasan Piker

Hasan Doğan Piker (, ; born July 25, 1991), also known as HasanAbi ("abi" meaning "elder brother" in Turkish), is a Turkish-American online streamer and left-wing political commentator.

He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and producer at The Young Turks and as a columnist at HuffPost.

He is currently one of the most-viewed and most-subscribed-to streamers on Twitch, where he covers news, plays a variety of video games, and discusses politics from a socialist perspective.

Hasan Doğan Piker was born to Turkish parents in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and raised in Istanbul.

His family emigrated to Turkey from Drama, Greece.

His father is Mehmet Behçet Piker, a political scientist and economist who served on the Board of Directors and as Vice-President of Sabancı Holding and who is the founding member of the right-wing Future Party in Turkey.

Piker says he was bullied during his time in public school in Turkey for his lack of physical fitness and questioning attitude towards Islam.

Piker returned to the United States and attended the University of Miami, then transferred to Rutgers University, where he graduated cum laude with a double major in political science and communication studies in 2013.

During his senior year of college in 2013, Piker interned for The Young Turks (TYT), a progressive news show and network co-founded by his uncle, Cenk Uygur.

After graduating, Piker was hired by the network's ad sales and business department.

He asked to host the show when a fill-in was needed, and later became a host and producer.

Uygur described his nephew as "magnetic" though "rough around the edges" at first.

In 2016, Piker created and hosted The Breakdown, a TYT Network video series which aired on Facebook and presented left-leaning political analysis targeted at millennial supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Piker also wrote political content for HuffPost from 2016 to 2018.

The show was nominated in the "Best Web Series" category at the 10th Shorty Awards in 2018.

Piker started streaming on Twitch in March 2018, while he was working at TYT.

Piker has said he shifted his attention from Facebook to Twitch in order to reach a younger audience, and because of what he felt was a preponderance of right-wing commentators on YouTube and a lack of leftist representation among streamers.

He became a popular left-wing political commentator, invited to appear on Fox News's The Issue Is and the political podcast Chapo Trap House.

His YouTube channel features highlights of his streams, and in 2022 reached over 1,000,000 subscribers.

Piker also streams gameplay and commentary of video games on his Twitch channel.

Sometimes Piker will role-play as "Hank Pecker", a caricature of a right-wing redneck.

Piker created and hosted another TYT series in 2019 called Agitprop with Hasan Piker.

During a Twitch stream on August 20, 2019, Piker criticized U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw, a SEAL Team 3 veteran who served in Afghanistan, for his support of American military interventionism overseas.

Piker said about Crenshaw, "What the fuck is wrong with this dude? Didn’t he go to war and like literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave fucking soldier fucked his eye hole with their dick?"

In the same stream, Piker criticized American foreign policy and made controversial comments relating to the September 11 attacks, including "America deserved 9/11."

His statements caused outrage on social media and were covered by Fox News and various other media outlets.

Crenshaw said that Piker's comments was a "disgusting defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against Americans."

The Young Turks host and Piker's uncle Cenk Uygur called them "very offensive," and invited Piker to appear on TYT to apologize.

Piker has defended his comments as satirical and cited American foreign policy as promoting conditions to make an event like 9/11 possible, but acknowledged that he should have used "more precise" language.

Twitch banned him for one week for the comments regarding Crenshaw and 9/11.

In January 2020, he announced his departure from TYT and his intention to focus on his career as a Twitch streamer.

On October 19, 2020, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez collaborated with Piker and fellow Twitch streamer Pokimane to organize a stream of the Representative playing popular multiplayer game Among Us for the "Get out the vote" initiative.

The stream aired the following day, featuring both Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar playing the game with Piker and many other popular Twitch streamers, reaching a total concurrent viewership of almost 700,000.

During the first 2020 United States presidential debate on September 29, Piker had over 125,000 viewers watching his commentary of the broadcast, the highest viewership of the debate on Twitch.

Piker's stream covering the results of the 2020 United States presidential election peaked at 230,000 concurrent viewers and was the sixth most-watched source of election coverage across YouTube and Twitch, comprising 4.9% of the market share.

He was the most watched Twitch streamer during the election week; his 80 hours of streams were viewed for a cumulative 6.8 million hours by an average of 75,000 concurrent viewers.

Piker's stream reached a new high of 231,000 viewers during the January 6 United States Capitol attack.

On December 13, 2021, Piker was banned from Twitch for one week for using the racial epithet "cracker" repeatedly on stream.

Piker argued that the term should not be considered a slur since a person using it is "powerless" and they "are doing it as someone who has been historically oppressed blowing off steam."

He further contended "cracker" is not a slur in the same way as other racial slurs, stating that "It's something I've talked about so many times because it's like white boys love fucking saying, 'Cracker is the same as the n-word,' It's really stupid. The etymology of the word is different. … It comes from 'whip cracker.' So the power is still in the hands of the white person in that situation, whereas the n-word is dehumanizing."