‘A playground for degenerates’: The dark corners of an Australian streaming giant

In October last year, Adin Ross stood blindfolded in a warehouse, waiting to receive a birthday present.

The moment was being filmed, naturally. Ross, 23, is one of the most popular livestreamers in the world.

A cake sitting on a table nearby was iced with a green letter K for Kick.com, the online platform where tens of thousands of people log on to watch Ross game, gamble, chat and play pranks.

Parked in the warehouse in front of Ross was a present from Kick’s founders.

“What the f---!” he shouted, blindfold discarded, climbing into the driver’s seat of a gleaming white car.

“A Rolls-Royce? Eddie, you got me a Rolls-Royce? That’s f---ing nuts. Bijan, you got me a Rolls-Royce?”

Eddie was a reference to Edward Craven, 28, Australia’s youngest billionaire. Bijan Tehrani is his business partner. The pair launched the Kick livestreaming service in late 2022, after making their fortunes with an online casino that accepts cryptocurrency.

Anyone with a webcam and an internet connection can become a streamer, or “content creator”, working in a medium that combines elements of regular video and social media.

Viewers, many of them males in their teens and 20s, go to streaming platforms to watch other people playing video games like Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite, “just chatting” with their audiences or roaming around IRL (in real life).

The dominant platform in the industry, Twitch, sold to Amazon a decade ago for $US1 billion and has since increased its revenue substantially.

Kick, headquartered in Australia, is much smaller but has also boasted impressive growth figures. Last month it recorded 152,000 active channels, peak viewership of 905,000 and 146 million hours of live content, according to the analytics site Streams Charts.

It has acquired naming rights to the Sauber Formula 1 team and made headlines by signing streamers such as Ross, who suggested in a recent interview that he is paid more than $10,000 an hour.

But Kick, which has long been known for edgy entertainment, has a growing reputation as a home for streamers who cross the line, with behaviour ranging from creepy to predatory.

One streamer, now banned, was this year accused of coaxing underage girls to strip in video chats he initiated on Kick and later distributing the images on the social media platform Discord.

Other prominent creators have had sex while streaming, brandished sex toys at children and made sexual comments toward girls as young as 13.

The giant v the challenger

Kick, a private company, gives little away when it comes to its earnings and inner workings. It declined to answer questions about the specific roles played by Tehrani and Craven, who are each 50 per cent shareholders.

But both have spoken publicly about making sure Kick is a safe site.

“I think people are realising the more controversial they are, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get, and it can sometimes be a dangerous mix in that regard,” Craven, who streams himself gambling on the platform most Saturdays, told The New York Times last year.

“So we are very quickly having to adapt what we consider to be above board and where we have to say ‘no’.”

A company spokeswoman told this masthead that while every large social media company faced moderation challenges, Kick “won’t hesitate to take action by removing prohibited content, muting accounts and suspending or banning creators”.

Others see few consequences for streamers who transgress.

“It’s literally a playground for people to be degenerates,” says Kristin Gillespie, co-founder of Rights to Unmute, a New York-based not-for-profit tackling misogyny, bigotry, racism and harassment in gaming.

“Whenever you see a headline about a streamer doing something explicit or ridiculous or potentially harmful and the word Kick is next to it, you’re like, ‘that makes sense’.”

Gillespie describes a “night and day” difference between Twitch and Kick when it comes to content moderation, with Kick tolerating overly sexual and at times “predatory behaviour”.

Part of the platform’s appeal to content creators is that it takes a 5 per cent cut of subscription revenue creators earn from fans, compared with the 30 to 40 per cent Twitch takes.

Kick also promotes itself as a believer in free speech, decrying cancel culture and promising “a reformative approach” rather than “blanket punitive measures” for streamers who breach its guidelines.

“That framing is definitely intended to criticise Twitch without directly coming out and saying it,” says Mark Johnson, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, who studies the streaming industry.

Spending time on Kick, Johnson was taken aback by the crude, sexual and insulting language used in chat comments.

“It really felt like an escape for all the people who didn’t want to behave as nicely as Twitch expects you to,” Johnson says. “Kick is much more lax, much more willing to turn a blind eye.”

The other big difference was the gambling content.

Before they were Kick’s co-owners, Craven and Tehrani built Stake.com, an online casino and sports betting platform that cannot legally accept Australian customers but has become one of the biggest gambling enterprises in the world.

In the past, Stake advertised its games by paying Twitch streamers large sums to gamble online. A month after Twitch announced a crackdown on these gambling streams, Craven and Tehrani launched Kick.

The timing was coincidental, Craven said last year. He rejects any suggestion Kick was designed to funnel viewers toward his casino.

Children enter the chat

Adin Ross, who has 1.2 million followers on Kick, openly discusses his contractual requirement to gamble while streaming.

But his online shtick relies more on stunts and a general appetite for controversy. He has featured video calls with the misogynist influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, saying he would like to take Tate out for dinner when he is no longer being detained on charges in Romania.

Ross calls the Miami location he streams from the “Brand Risk Warehouse”.

Soon after he started with Kick, he streamed himself visiting a porn site. Like other streamers, he has used video chat apps to match with strangers online, sometimes pretending to expose himself with a pair of fake balls.

This year, he told a woman that he was not recording, before he described in graphic terms what he wanted to do to her sexually and made a masturbation gesture.

In a video chat from last year, Ross suggested a threesome to a pair of girls. One replied she was 13 before Ross hurriedly shut the app.

Ross’s associate, a 23-year-old streamer called Cheesur, has made sexual comments or gestures to under-18s on chat calls. This year, he held a lifelike dildo in front of a girl who then said she was 15, while Ross laughed and gently encouraged him to end the chat.

Neither Cheesur, whose account was recently removed from Kick, nor Ross responded to questions.

Craven, who lives in Melbourne, has described Ross as a friend. “I speak to Adin personally, I look after Adin personally, I’ve had to give Adin a call and say, ‘Hey man, what’s going on here?’ ” Craven said in an interview last year.

However, he declined to answer questions from this masthead about Ross’ behaviour. A Kick spokeswoman said: “We do not discuss allegations about individual streamers.”

Responding to questions about specific video examples, the company said they “date back to when Kick was starting up”. After it was pointed out that several were less than two months old, Kick issued a new statement.

“All of these videos appear to have been made prior to our most recent community guidelines update on 27 February 2024,” the spokeswoman said.

This update made clear “sharing content involving minors (or any individual a reasonable person would consider to be a minor) produced on external sites such as ome.tv and Monkey is strictly prohibited and will be removed by our moderators”.

Two clips of streamer Jon Zherka hitting on girls under the age of 16 disappeared from Kick after this masthead put questions about them to the company.

Zherka, a 30-year-old Canadian-Albanian who describes himself as a “dark comedian”, has made repeated online comments about sexually preferring teenagers.

“I wanna date you, look at you,” he said to a girl who then said she was 13. “You look f---ing 48, bitch,” Zherka said before the chat finished. It is unclear who ended the call.

In the video below, Zherka and another streamer matched with two girls. The other streamer said they would make a great double date. “What up girls, I want to kiss you guys,” Zherka said, before one girl said she was 14. The video chat ended shortly after.

The streamers later said they were joking in the interaction, with Zherka suggesting he pretended to be “a paedo” as a ploy to get more viewers. Zherka, who was permanently banned from Kick in April due to hate speech, did not respond to questions.

‘Why Kick is the GOAT’

Kick says it is striking a sensible balance with its content moderation.

“Twitch is often accused of being too conservative in its moderation, while X (formerly Twitter) is often criticised for not moderating enough,” a spokeswoman said.

The Kick approach was praised last year by one of its streamers, Heelmike. He had received a one-day ban after filming himself receiving oral sex.

“This is why Kick is the GOAT because they reach out and tell creators what they did wrong,” Heelmike posted on social media.

Last month, Heelmike protested online that he had been suspended for “underage endangerment”, including a picture of himself with a female he said was 24. He also made what appeared to be a call for help to Craven.

“I need a raise, Eddie!” he said.

Heelmike, who did not respond to questions, has since been allowed to return to Kick. Craven did not answer when asked about the online post.

Australia’s eSafety Commission has received a small number of complaints about Kick. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said livestreaming carried unique risks and while moderating live content could be more difficult, it was not beyond the capacity of platforms.

“The tech sector needs to stop looking the other way when it comes to issues of online safety, especially when harms directly impact children and other at-risk groups,” Inman Grant said. She encouraged anyone who sees illegal content or is the target of abuse to report it to eSafety.

Craven, who has stated Kick could become profitable in three to five years through the introduction of advertising, has spoken about keeping on the right side of content moderation policy.

However, he was criticised last year after 404 Media revealed he had posted laughter emojis during a stream in which a sex worker was briefly barred from leaving a Brisbane hotel room.

Kick declined to comment on this incident.

“As Kick’s founders, Ed and Bijan are committed to creating an online community that is diverse, compliant with laws and regulations around the world, as well as safe and engaging for users,” the spokeswoman said.

“To achieve this, Kick has a large team of dedicated moderators, working 24/7/365 monitoring the platform to ensure content meets our community guidelines.

“We also enable and encourage our users to report content they believe does not meet our guidelines for review and action by our moderation team.”

A public defence and a present

In February this year, it was Adin Ross’ turn to give someone a car. In the same spot where he received his Rolls-Royce, he unveiled a BMW as a birthday present for his assistant, a streamer known as Citrus.

Two days earlier, Ross had publicly defended Citrus, who had been accused of manipulating a woman into stripping during a livestream without telling her she was being recorded.

When Citrus appeared on Ross’ channel, he denied all wrongdoing, saying the woman was 24 years old, had stripped for other streamers before, and knew what she was doing.

Citrus, who remains on Kick, called the woman “a whore”. Ross laughed – and asked to be handed a protein bar.

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