“Lucrative yet destructive”: Coverage of gambling live streams in the media

Gambling videos involving “influencers” or “content creators” wagering real-world money are increasingly popular on sites like Twitch and Kick. To understand how this phenomenon is being presented by news media and hence disseminated into the public sphere, we examine how live streamed gambling videos are framed in the media, drawing on 120 articles from 2018 to 2024. We identify three main emerging frames – risks to young people, risks of addiction, and these streams’ questionable legality – and interrogate how these are being constructed and contextualised within expected general knowledge. The paper consequently reveals how this new form of digital gambling content consumption is being discussed and conceptualised by journalists, and hence how public debate around it is being framed. This sheds further light on how emerging gambling practices become framed within existing and familiar contexts, and shows for the first time the potential paths by which this specific phenomenon might become addressed by legislators and regulators in the future.