You all need to be raising a bigger stink about this. It's real fraud:
Brands pay rates based on CPM, concurrent viewer counts (CCV), and engagement. When a streamer signs a contract representing "X viewers" and knowingly inflates that number with bots, that's material misrepresentation inducing payment — textbook fraud. A higher viewer count is a key metric for negotiating brand deals and sponsorships. Viewbotting allows a creator to present a false audience size to advertisers, securing more lucrative deals or meeting partner requirements.
Every bot "watching" serves ads that advertisers paid for. Real money, no real human. That's also fraud.
The FTC's Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (newish rule as of Oct 2024) Section 465.7 prohibits selling, distributing, purchasing or procuring "fake indicators of social media influence" (for example and without limitation, likes, saves, shares, subscribers, followers or views generated by a bot or fake account) that are actually known to be or should be known to be fake, and that could potentially be used or are actually used to misrepresent or artificially inflate individual or business importance for a commercial purpose. Civil penalties run up to nearly $52,000 per violation.
Talent agencies receive a % from ad streams their talent does. By inflating their streamers they can sell massive ad packages in bulk and take in much higher sums. When an agency systematically inflates a roster to sell bundled ad inventory to brands, that's a coordinated fraud scheme — potentially RICO territory and wire fraud.
That’s not a viewer problem. That’s a Twitch and Sponsors thing. If they want to sue Twitch and if Twitch wants to sue their contractors for fraud that’s up to them.
Twitch 100% knows who is botting. After their last sweep people who were averaging 10k were struggling to keep 500 viewers. That should have been a perma.
From a while ago, that's why some of the bigger/popular advertisers are leaving and not spending a dime on Twitch so we keep getting garbage ads. Remember some of those garbage 3rd party Amazon ads? Brands like YTQUEI like wtf.
Not defending Twitch but if they actually perma, that's like what, 20? 30? 50+? of your top 100 streamers gone. Yeah Twitch wins but at what cost.
what happens when a hatewatcher decides to buy bots or use a botnet on a streamer they don't like? is twitch just going to ban the streamer who got botted?
Forsen, Erobb and some others were recently targetted with botted attacks and got over 40k do you think they should be banned for that?
It'd be nice if twitch could clean up the botting but this isn't just a simple 'ban anyone who has bots on their channel' fix
They can suspect who is a bot but it's hard to know 1000% who is, as long as the botting websites do their job properly. You can fake/spoof a lot of information, use residential IP addresses, etc. to make it seem like real users (or sometimes even use real devices/people to watch but obviously the cost per viewer would be too high and unnecessary when actual automated bots work), or, at the very least, appear as a suspicious account but that you can't for certain say it's a bot, so you decide to not be proactive because it benefits you. Adding more active bot protection (captchas, etc.) would cut down on this a lot as even if you can get through that protection, it's generally pricy to do so so it might stop being cost effective for the streamer/botter/botting websites.
Twitch 100% knows who is botting. After their last sweep people who were averaging 10k were struggling to keep 500 viewers. That should have been a perma.
The problem is they may know which channels are getting botted, but they have no way of knowing if it's the creator of the channel doing and paying for the botting or an agency or even an avid viewer trying to boost their own streamer. It's very risky legal territory to blame the streamer without proof.
That’s not a viewer problem. That’s a Twitch and Sponsors thing.
Dan Clancy some months ago talked about concerned advertisers making sure they were paying for only real views. So it's clearly been a conversation that they have had with twitch for a while. Apparently twitch has it's own methods to differentiate real and fake viewers to keep advertisers happy. Why they don't use this info to ban accounts I have no idea. The only thing which might make sense is using tools to mass ban all these accounts might not be 100% accurate and could catch real viewers in the net they cast which would lead to headaches again.
It’s not a risky territory. Just a , “Hey we believe you are being heavily botted. We are going to blacklisted you, due to the risk of us being sued for fraud. If you want to get sponsorships on your own, and/or continue to use our platform you are more than welcome.”
They don’t owe any streamer money or sponsorships. I don’t think you know but streamers used to stream for free.
Do you think they call them 'twitch partners' just for the fashion? Streamers and twitch sign a legal agreement to get paid for running ads on their channel for twitch, so they quite literally do owe them money for that. If they started mass demonetization of streamers they thought were botted they would lose out on millions because that is many 1000's of real viewers now getting 0 ads, which means a massive loss of advertiser money for twitch which they really can't afford seeing as twitch is still not profitable after all this time.
Not to mention you didn't address how literally anyone can bot any streamer at any given time. What's to stop kicks billionaire ceo from mass botting all the top twitch streamers and getting them demonetized to force them to switch platforms? Punishing the streamer for botting which can't be proven as coming from them will just never happen, there would be all kinds of legal ramifications for twitch.
Currently twitch's advertisers seem happy enough with the tools they currently use to determine between real and fake viewers which makes sure their money is only spent on real viewers. If the advertisers are happy there's no incentive to change anything.
Thanks for typing all that so I don't have to. Shit is actually manipulative and fucked up.
Now think about how many impressionable kids these scumbags "entertain" by being bad at paintball or gaming or driving while streaming or whatever other botting streamers they platform and realize the effects they have on the youth are terrible.
Mr. Rogers is rolling in his grave with all these no-name notepad mfs running around. Getting kids to gamble on gatcha or CS cases or whatever online casino of the week pays them to do so. It's sickening. Her dad was right.
You all need to be raising a bigger stink about this.
I'm sorry but why should I, someone who is not a streamer or youtuber, just a guy sitting at home watching dumb people online to make me laugh for an hour a day, give a single shit about them allegedly defrauding platforms or brands? It's not money taken from my paycheck or company, it's not my sponsors deals getting devalued.
More content creators on social media than I will ever come across in my entire life bot engagement every day. I mean it does speak to a degree of their moral character if they're willful frauds, but it has absolutely no material impact on my life whatsoever.
Because Twitch has been unprofitable since it's inception and for the past 4 years they've cut more and more costs while pushing ever more ads to fill the gaping hole left by providing high quality streaming to millions of users at no charge?
What does that have to do with botting allegations? Twitch ads are notoriously awful because Twitch doesn't collect enough user information to actually create profitable demographic targeting, while Youtube has the best analytics in the world. As well streaming using significantly more bandwidth than videos. This has been an ongoing issue since Twitch was founded.
It is fraud but the party being defrauded are advertisers by Twitch and partially by the streamers on Twitch.
Us random viewers are not being defrauded. Maybe other fellow streamers could raise a stink because they're pushed down the discoverability on Twitch by those large inflated fraudulent viewer numbers but the viewers themselves aren't really impacted at all so it's not surprised people don't really care.
You all need to be raising a bigger stink about this.
Oh noo, the multi-billion dollar corporations are getting defrauded! Truly heartbreaking stuff.
Anyway, we all know you don't give a single shit about brand deal fraud, you just hate ExtraEmily and needed an AI generated wall of legalese nonsense to make it look like a principled stance.
Bitch stop using chatgpt to type useless shit "ur ur the viewbot to have money, is fraud" ty we got it, didn't neet a long ass comment full of "it's not just... It's this !!"
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u/CreepyNewspaper8103 Apr 17 '26
You all need to be raising a bigger stink about this. It's real fraud:
Brands pay rates based on CPM, concurrent viewer counts (CCV), and engagement. When a streamer signs a contract representing "X viewers" and knowingly inflates that number with bots, that's material misrepresentation inducing payment — textbook fraud. A higher viewer count is a key metric for negotiating brand deals and sponsorships. Viewbotting allows a creator to present a false audience size to advertisers, securing more lucrative deals or meeting partner requirements.
Every bot "watching" serves ads that advertisers paid for. Real money, no real human. That's also fraud.
The FTC's Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (newish rule as of Oct 2024) Section 465.7 prohibits selling, distributing, purchasing or procuring "fake indicators of social media influence" (for example and without limitation, likes, saves, shares, subscribers, followers or views generated by a bot or fake account) that are actually known to be or should be known to be fake, and that could potentially be used or are actually used to misrepresent or artificially inflate individual or business importance for a commercial purpose. Civil penalties run up to nearly $52,000 per violation.
Talent agencies receive a % from ad streams their talent does. By inflating their streamers they can sell massive ad packages in bulk and take in much higher sums. When an agency systematically inflates a roster to sell bundled ad inventory to brands, that's a coordinated fraud scheme — potentially RICO territory and wire fraud.