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Actor

1991-07-25 · New Brunswick · Male

5 series in the catalog

Hasan Doğan Piker (born July 25, 1991), known online as HasanAbi, is an American left-wing political commentator, Twitch streamer, and influencer.

He began streaming on Twitch in March 2018, while working at The Young Turks (TYT), leaving the network in 2020 to focus full-time on his streaming career. His broadcasts combine current affairs commentary, political debates, and international news with gameplay and reaction content. As of 2026, Piker's channel ranks among the platform's most-subscribed.

Piker has been characterized as one of the most prominent voices of the American Left in digital media, using his platform to comment on U.S. politics and foreign policy, particularly the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He has also engaged in offline political mobilization, campaigning for progressive candidates.

Early life and education

Hasan Doğan Piker was born on July 25, 1991 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Turkish Muslim parents. He has said that he grew up mostly in Istanbul and Ankara, adding that he was surrounded by Muslim culture. He describes himself today as culturally Muslim but not an avid follower of the faith. In Turkey, Piker attended the private TED Ankara Koleji, then a public school, and finally Bilkent Laboratory and International School.

According to Piker, his father's family emigrated to Turkey from Thessaloniki and Crete. His father, Mehmet Behçet Piker, is a political scientist and economist who was a board member and vice president of the Turkish financial conglomerate Sabancı Holding and is a founding member of Turkey's conservative Future Party. His mother, Ülker Sedef Piker (née Uygur), is an art and architectural historian who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His uncle, Cenk Uygur, is a political commentator and co-founder of The Young Turks (TYT), a left-wing news network.

After graduating, Piker returned to the United States and attended the University of Miami, then transferred to Rutgers University, where he joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. In 2013, he graduated cum laude from Rutgers with a double major in political science and communication studies.

Career

2013–2018: The Young Turks

During his senior year of college in 2013, Piker interned for The Young Turks. The network's ad sales and business department hired him after he graduated. Piker said this would make him a "nepo baby" but believed "those types of advantages don't matter" in "a perfect society". 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 that aired on Facebook and presented left-leaning political analyses targeted, at the time, at millennial supporters of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Piker also contributed political content to HuffPost from 2016 to 2018.

2018–2020: Early Twitch career and The Young Turks

Piker started streaming on Twitch on March 23, 2018, while working at TYT. In January 2020, he left TYT to focus on his career as a Twitch streamer. Piker said he shifted his attention from Facebook to Twitch to reach a younger audience and because of what he saw as a preponderance of right-wing commentators on YouTube and a lack of leftist representation among streamers. He became a popular left-wing political commentator and was invited to appear on KTTV's The Issue Is and the political podcast Chapo Trap House. His YouTube channel features highlights of his streams, and reached over 1,000,000 subscribers in 2022. Piker also streams gameplay and commentary on video games. Sometimes he role-plays as "Hank Pecker", an ethno-political caricature of a "right-wing redneck".

During a Twitch stream in August 2019, Piker criticized American foreign policy and made controversial comments about the September 11 attacks, including "America deserved 9/11." Piker called his comments satirical and said U.S. foreign policy made an event like 9/11 possible but acknowledged that he should have used "more precise" language. Piker received a short-term ban for his comments.

2020–2025: Twitch and political commentary

After leaving TYT, Piker established himself on Twitch as a political commentator. His livestreams usually include discussions of current affairs and lifestyle stories, playing video games, reacting to memes and media clips, and interacting with his viewers. Piker has mobilized his followers to 'ratio' opponents, including conservative influencers and Republican politicians. According to researchers, "Piker's streams provide many young people with a sense of community, acceptance, place" and "figures like Piker have a critical role to play in moving young people away from both the 'red pill'—online right-wing and misogynist discourse—and the 'black pill'—online discourses of hopelessness and nihilism."

In October 2020, U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez collaborated with Piker and fellow Twitch streamer Pokimane to organize a stream of Ocasio-Cortez playing the popular multiplayer game Among Us for the "Get out the vote" initiative for the then upcoming presidential election. The stream aired the next day, featuring both Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar playing the game with Piker and other popular Twitch streamers, reaching a total concurrent viewership of almost 700,000.

During the first 2020 United States presidential debate in September, over 125,000 viewers watched Piker's commentary on the stream, the highest viewership for 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 on YouTube or 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.

Since 2021, Piker has hosted the podcast Fear& (formerly Fear&Malding) alongside his friend and fellow Twitch streamer Will Neff. Streamers QTCinderella and AustinShow joined the podcast as co-hosts in 2022.

From September 2021 to October 2023, Piker co-hosted the left-leaning political podcast Leftovers with Ethan Klein.

In December 2021, Piker was banned from Twitch for a week after using the slur "cracker" in reference to white people, after two of his chat moderators were banned for using it. He argued the term should not be considered a slur since a person using it is "powerless" and would be "doing it as someone who has been historically oppressed blowing off steam." A paper in New Media & Society criticized Twitch for punishing Piker while epithets aimed at minority groups were prevalent on the platform.

Piker was given credentialed access and livestreamed at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and his 2024 election night coverage stream had 7.5 million viewers.

In February 2025, Piker said that if Republicans "cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, [they] would kill Rick Scott", in a reference to Scott's involvement in Medicare and Medicaid fraud when he was the CEO of Columbia/HCA. Twitch banned Piker for 24 hours in March for the comment. In May, Twitch banned Piker for 24 hours for "improper handling of terrorist propaganda" after he showed a manifesto allegedly by Elias Rodriguez, the perpetrator of the 2025 Capital Jewish Museum shooting.

In May 2025, Piker was detained for around two hours by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago after returning from a trip to France. According to Piker, the officials who questioned him during his detention knew who he was and asked him detailed questions about his views on Donald Trump, Israel, Houthi rebels, Hamas, and his Twitch bans. Piker believed he was detained due to his political views and…