On Twitch, there have long been nasty cheaters who don’t earn real viewers but artificially inflate the statistics. Now the boss has spoken about the cheaters.
What is it about? On Twitch, the concurrent viewers of a stream are an important metric for streamers. They clearly show who is currently popular and who still belongs to the smaller streamers.
Building a Twitch channel is difficult, which is why some cheaters buy fake viewers for money. These bots massively inflate the concurrent viewer counts and deceive others into thinking a popular streamer is live here.
Buying the so-called viewbots violates Twitch’s rules and can also lead to a ban of the account. Now the head of Twitch himself has talked about the cheaters.
The fight against the cheaters is not easy
What does the boss of Twitch say about the cheaters? Twitch CEO Dan Clancy was recently a guest of the big livestreamer Kai Cenat. There he spoke in the stream on Twitch with Cenat and other streamers about various topics around Twitch and the influencer scene.
The topic of viewbotting also came up. The boss of Twitch explained that it would be a “delicate matter,” simply because the viewbotters are always there, even when one tries to combat them.
At the end of July 2025, Twitch announced in a statement on X.com that they wanted to take tougher action against viewbotters and had improved their methods to identify false viewers.
In the livestream with Cenat, the CEO explained, however, that other platforms like Instagram and TikTok also have the same problems with bots in their live features. In his opinion, it is not just a Twitch problem, but affects the entire industry.
How can you recognize fake viewers? Recognizing fake viewers is not easy, as Twitch and the other platforms have also noticed. Accounts with viewbots are especially noticeable due to the lack of activity in the chat.
If, despite having 500 viewers, only a few messages are posted and hardly any interaction occurs, then this is indeed very conspicuous, but still not proof. Even the streamers themselves are sometimes not behind the viewbotting. Theoretically, anyone with enough money can buy fake viewers for any streamer.
The purchase of viewbots is said to be more common than one might think. The streamer Tyler “Trainwreckstv” Niknam (34) called out the top 100 on Twitch in 2024 and claimed that most of the big streamers are cheating, while honest ones lag behind.
That even the head of Twitch finds no more hopeful words against the cheaters and refers in his argument to an industry problem suggests that we should not expect a crackdown on fake viewers anytime soon. How to become famous in an honest way, you can find out here: Gaming streamer advises aspiring talents on Twitch: “First, get yourself a proper job”
