Twitch is putting streamers on notice about viewbotting. The company is taking new steps to crack down on people caught artificially inflating their viewership stats, according to an update from CEO Dan Clancy.
“Today, we’re introducing a new enforcement type that we plan to roll out over the next few weeks,” Clancy shared in a post on X. “For channels identified as persistently viewbotting, we will apply a cap to the streamer’s CCV [concurrent views] for a fixed period of time, on all of the Twitch surfaces.” Clancy added that the cap would be based on “historical data regarding that creator’s non-viewbotted traffic” and that the limits will increase in duration with repeated violations.
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The changes are among the most aggressive steps the platform has taken to combat the practice, which relies on third-party tools to make a stream appear as if it has more live viewers than it does. In his update, Clancy said he was withholding some details about how and when Twitch would enforce the new rules in order to make it harder for the makers of these tools to circumvent the new measures. “Effectively combatting viewbotting is challenging,” he wrote. “As we deploy updates to our real-time detection algorithms, viewbotting companies quickly respond with updates to avoid detection.”
This isn’t the first time Twitch has tried to crack down on viewbotting. The company has regularly purged suspected bot accounts from its platform, including in 2021 when it took down 7.5 million of them. What’s interesting about the company’s latest strategy, however, is that they will directly penalize the creators’ whose streams see the inauthentic engagement. Judging by some replies to Clancy’s post, this has raised some concern that the new policy could allow smaller streamers to be unfairly targeted with viewbotting in order to suppress their reach. There are also likely to be questions about how exactly the company will distinguish suspected viewbotting from natural spikes in engagement.