Screenshot/Twitch, @HasanAbi
- Twitch streamer Hasan Piker told Insider that he got into politics during his childhood in Turkey.
- In particular, he cited an incident in 2005 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan sued a cartoonist.
- He said that he was "shocked" at how far that "act of suppression of freedom" went.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Hasan Piker became interested in politics after he witnessed Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sue a cartoonist for drawing him as an animal, the Twitch streamer and left-wing political commentator told Insider in a recent interview.
"I'm shocked at how far that went, that act of suppression of freedom," said Piker, 30, who currently resides in Los Angeles but grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, after he was born in New Jersey.
Piker has 1.5 million followers on the live-streaming platform Twitch, where he goes by the handle @HasanAbi and is notorious for his off-the-cuff speaking style and internet-minded humor.
Piker was a teenager in 2004 when Erdogan, then the country's prime minister, launched the lawsuit against Musa Kart, a cartoonist who drew the Turkish politician as a cat with a huge head and a flurry of yarn strings.
Erdogan sued Kart, who was initially ordered by a court in Ankara, the nation's capital, to pay a fine of $3,500 for "publicly humiliating the prime minister," BBC News reported in 2005.
Read More: Hasan Piker just wants to have fun and 'talk shit': How the political pundit became an internet icon
Piker said "political cartoons are really important" in Turkey and play a bigger cultural role than they do in the US and that politics is ever-present, something that "all people talk about."
Expression Interrupted, a website that tracks the incarceration of journalists and academics in Turkey, reported that the case against Kart, who worked as a cartoonist for the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet Daily, was later overruled and the fine was thrown out, so Kart did not have to pay the fine.
Erdogan's rule has been characterized as "autocratic" and the leader has become increasingly hostile toward dissenting opinions over the years, The New York Times reported.
On the 2021 World Press Freedom Index, which calculates how safe a country is for journalists based on an array of factors including censorship and violence taken against journalists, Turkey scored in 153rd place out of 180 countries.
Piker said that witnessing the lawsuit was profound for his development at the time.
In the last few years, Piker rose from being a host on the left-wing talk show "The Young Turks" to having a fanatical fan base across the internet.
He helped arrange a stream of the game "Among Us" with US Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar that became the third most-watched Twitch broadcast of all time, reported CNET.
Read more stories from Insider's Digital Culture desk.
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