Complaint against a total of 7 sellers of bots.
Twitch.TV is one of the largest live streaming platforms on the internet. Often, the website is used by gamers who play in front of a live audience and can communicate with the viewers through chat. However, bots can quickly ruin this fun by manipulating follower counts, chat activities, or viewer numbers. TwitchTV has now taken a step further to protect the safety of Twitch viewers and streamers from these bots.
Why are bots harmful to streamers and viewers?
As mentioned earlier, these bots are used to manipulate viewer and follower numbers or to simulate chat activities. On one hand, these bots are used by streamers themselves because they believe a higher viewer count and social activities will lead them directly to a TwitchTV partnership (a way to earn money with their streams).
On the other hand, these bots are also used to deny other streamers the TwitchTV partnership or even to get their streaming channel suspended. Since it is only in a few cases that one can prove who is responsible for the bot attack, innocent streamers often find their lives made difficult. These bot sellers are paid and subsequently send non-human viewers to a streamer’s channel – as a result, their viewer count increases and they are ranked higher in the directory of a particular game.
Of course, this has its advantages as it allows reaching more viewers and potentially integrating them into one’s fan base – on the other hand, bots can be very easily exposed if a streamer, for example, has 5000 viewers but only 10 people are chatting. When these bots are revealed, the reputation of the streamer suffers quickly – no matter whether they are responsible for the bots or someone else has sent these bots.
Bot combat at TwitchTV in 3 steps
This issue is taken seriously at Twitch, and therefore there was now an official blog post from the Senior Vice President of Marketing: “Matthew DiPietro”. Here, it is explained in 3 steps how to tackle the problem.
- 1. Work is underway on further solutions to identify and remove “fake viewers”. This is an ongoing process that is constantly being improved and is expected to work even more effectively in the future.
- 2. The moderators, support, and partnership teams follow up on reports of fake viewers or follower counts and chat activities and handle each report case by case.
- 3. The third point to protect viewers and streamers from the damage caused by bots is legal action. A public lawsuit is being filed against a total of 7 bot sellers, addressing issues such as trademark infringement, fraud, and anti-competitive practices.
The most important step against these bots is, however, not to use the service at all. You are not only harming yourselves by using bots for your channel or against other channels, but you are also harming the Twitch community as a whole.
The entire blog post including public lawsuit can be found on the official Twitch blog website. Here is the blog post on the official TwitchTV blog website.
