Conservatives haven’t forgotten Rolling Stone’s glamour-selfie cover for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tzarnaev in 2013. There was a tinny echo this week when the music magazine touted radical America-hating leftist Hasan Piker as #3 on its list of the Top 25 most influential content creators and social-media influencers of 2026.
"Don't be surprised if you don't recognize 90 percent of these names," joked Grateful Calvin at Twitchy. "This is the magazine's attempt to assert itself as cooler than everyone else." For example, "There's virtually no one outside of New York City who even knows who Pooja Tripathi is (not to mention most of the people IN the city)".
Writer Elizabeth Garber-Paul summarized Piker’s "inflammatory" schtick:
Handle: @hasanabi
Genre: Political streamer
Followers: 11 million“There’s always been friction,” Hasan Piker says. “I just never thought it would get to this degree.” The self-declared Marxist, 35, has found himself at the center of endless controversies, thanks to his inflammatory criticism of Israel on his daily streams — eagerly clipped by both Fox News and MS NOW — but also, he says, because he has become the chiseled face of a movement to push the Democratic Party to the left. “If you were to ask me, ‘What was the turning point?’ It was certainly Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign,” he says. There, he saw centrists “burn their credibility” by backing Andrew Cuomo. “They started recognizing that there was a real threat [in] these insurgent movements,” he says. “And they weren’t wrong.”
Piker streams upward of seven hours a day, reacting to news, interviewing guests, and interacting with his chat. Though he’s stumped for AOC and Bernie Sanders, he’s recently started campaigning for lesser-known candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros.
As often happens on the Left wing of the media, Piker is "inflammatory" but there's no space for specifics like "America deserved 9/11" or he's "vote for Hamas over Israel every single time." All that matters is he's "eagerly clipped" by cable news networks.
Twitchy pointed out Piker's not #3 in audience:
Piker has about 11 million followers across all social media platforms. That's far too many, but it pales in comparison to some of the others on Rolling Stone's list, like Mark Fischbach (77 million), Dhar Mann (171 million), and Darren Jason Watkins Jr., known online as "IShowSpeed" (195 million).
