FerociouslySteph, known across r/LivestreamFail as Deer Girl, is trolling the entire Twitch community in the most obvious way and you're all falling for it.
When Twitch announced their bureaucratically named Twitch Safety Advisory Council this week, it was quickly dismissed by many as a publicity stunt. Twitch explains in their blog post that the committee of streamers and activists has been assembled in order to help guide Twitch in drafting new policies and improve the safety and moderation of the service.
While the efficacy is the council is up for debate (and will continue to be for as long as it exists) one member of the committee immediately sparked outrage because of her political perspectives and idiosyncratic behavior. Many bad actors in the Twitch community immediately started harassing her on stream which led to an avalanche of out-of-context clips that are still fueling the outrage today.
The streamer, FerociouslySteph, is seemingly unphased by the outrage and harassment. In fact, she's doing her level best to fuel it, and everyone feeding into it is really showing their ass.
FerociouslySteph is a transwoman that identifies as a deer. Before she ever expressed a single opinion, there was already a massive target on her. Of course, Steph has some pretty divisive opinions as well. She believes voice chat gives a competitive advantage to cis-gendered male players because they don't experience the same widespread online harassment that women and other marginalized groups do, and should, therefore, be disabled in any competitive environment. This is a stance she defends by directly calling out her opponents for having cis white male-sounding voices. She thinks a lot of gamers are white supremacists, though even after watching the stream it's hard to discern what exactly she meant by that.
In short, FerouciouslySteph is a non-cis furry that actively wants to tear down the established systems in the gaming community that historically benefit white men. Also if you disagree with her, she might call you a Nazi. In other words, Steph is toxic gaming's worst nightmare; a sort-of SJW Boogeyman coming to ruin all the games. And guess what? She's living for that persona right now.
All of this attention, some of it support – most of it harassment – is driving a ton of traffic to Steph's channel. Look beyond the trending clips and you'll see Steph dancing around celebrating how much attention she's getting and how angry people are getting. She titles her stream (Troll warning) and thanks angry gamers for all the attention:
"You can't get rid of me, Twitch is endorsing me, and there's nothing you can do about it."
FerociouslySteph is quite literally feeding on all of your salty gamer tears. The more angry people get, the more attention she gets. No one had heard of FerociouslySteph before the Twitch Safety Advisory Council. Her channel rarely saw more than 100 concurrent views, now it has thousands. Before the announcement her VODS never broke 100 view total, her last two streams since the announcement has close to 10,000.
If you're upset about the things Steph does and says, all you need to do is stop participating in the conversation. Her voice on the council is 1 of 8 and she represents a very real group of viewers and streamers on Twitch. Whether you think she's cringey or not, no one deserves to be harassed. Are some of her opinions problematic? Probably. Is the Twitch Advisory Safety Committee a meaningless organization? Most likely. Are a whole lot of people getting trolled all the way to the bank?
100% yes.