“There’s no way this streamer has 20K viewers,” you’ve probably mumbled to yourself at some point. We might find out soon enough if that’s true, thanks to new regulations announced today by the Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC published a “final” ruling on purchasing AI comments and reviews for products today, strictly prohibiting the practice in the United States. And while most of these new rules target reviews and testimonials for products, there’s also an interesting addition in the last section about social media indicators. “The final rule prohibits anyone from selling or buying fake indicators of social media influence, such as followers or views generated by a bot or hijacked account,” the post reads. That definitely seems to implicate stream viewership numbers, as companies and esports organizations often tout their viewership numbers to media companies and prospective investors alike. And it could mean any U.S. streamers that are view botting will need to clean up their act quickly.
Just today, a press release and blog posted by Stream Hatchet touted FaZe Clan’s viewership numbers, showing how that metric is clearly still valued in the content creation business. View botting, or purchasing a service to send bot accounts to inflate viewership numbers, intentionally obscures real viewership counts and can enable streamers and orgs that purchase said bots to artificially inflate their reach on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kick.
View botting has been a controversial practice for a while now, with accusations of botting often lobbed at popular streamers that seem fishy, or from one streamer to another content creator in the midst of an argument.
Streamers that are botting often have large viewer counts but little to no activity happening in their chat, as well as strange underlying performance metrics, such as not gaining or even losing followers while sitting near the top of a game category on a given platform. If a person has thousands of real people watching their stream, they almost definitely should have an active chat, and no following or subscription activity is simply bizarre. Either they’ve created the strangest streaming community in existence, or they might be botting.
So if you notice any streamer’s viewership counts take a sudden and drastic dip in the coming months, it might be some food for thought on the validity of those viewers. And all it took was the government possibly making it illegal.
