Breitbart Tech Editor Hosts Epic 8-Hour Free Speech Live Stream

Milo Yiannopoulos, Noah Dulis and the rest of the Breitbart Tech team held an all-star 8-hour live stream on YouTube today, bringing together cultural libertarian thinkers, gamers, journalists, Hollywood celebrities, Internet personalities, filmmakers, trolls and contrarians in what might be the first accidental think tank.

I was also there. The stream reached and then maintained 3,000 viewers for almost all eight hours, with 15,000 people tuning in over the course of the carnival of free speech.

Milo held court, (gently) forcing groups of very different people who agree on one issue, free speech, to mix with each other in what felt like the Internet’s strangest ever dinner party. Adam Baldwin and Stephen Crowder discussed Donald Trump; Ben Garrison and Milo discussed trolling and art, trans women argued with gay men who argued with the patriarchy while discussing feminist filmmaking.

The guest list was extensive, odd, and in the dozens. Only social justice activist Suey Park failed to show up, though it did Yiannopoulos a favour in the end as she was the only person on the guest list who had demanded to be paid.

And when everyone’s time was up, Emperor @Nero gave the thumbs down and booted you off the stream – it was very Battle Royale, and I was proud of making it to fifth place… though I should have gone out much, much sooner.

Judging by the thousands of tweets on the #BIGMILO hashtag (all caps, Milo is serious about that) it went rather well. Like a good novel I don’t suggest anyone dive into this in one sitting, but I had to mute myself most of the time because I couldn’t stop laughing, and I think the guests made some really interesting points throughout.

More importantly, we all started talking to each other, even when we disagreed, or hated each other’s points. We listened, we talked, we stayed civil. Nobody got triggered.

I think that’s important, in a way… just as a proof of concept. Dialog can happen.

We weren’t the only group streaming tonight. Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian staged her first foray into live streaming tonight. But it wasn’t quite the roaring success she was hoping for, as less than 900 viewers showed up to her Twitch.tv stream of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate – many of them only there to post #BIGMILO in the chat, which  mods frantically deleted (some users posted #LargeMilo to get around the word ban after that) before closing the chat to the public. Sarkeesian’s 900 viewers compared poorly to the 15,000 who tuned in to #BIGMILO.

Was #BIGMILO the best stream of all time? Yeah, probably.

Follow Will Ross on Twitter @SawmillLoris. Breitbart Tech is a new vertical from Breitbart News covering tech, gaming and internet culture. Bookmark breitbart.com/tech and follow @BreitbartTech on Twitter and Facebook.