Hasan Piker

American Twitch streamer and left-wing political commentator who 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.

Piker was born to Turkish parents in the USA and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. He has said that 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 US 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. 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. Piker created and hosted another TYT series in 2019 called Agitprop with Hasan Piker. In January 2020, he announced his departure from TYT.

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