Game streaming platform Twitch has just unleashed a massive wave of bans across the site targeting accounts that participate in follow-botting and view-botting, with over 7 million accounts reportedly banned. Since the site's launch in 2011, Twitch has worked its way up to become the world's largest game streaming platform, pulling in millions of viewers on a daily basis. However, while the platform has found lucrative success, Twitch has had its fair share of controversies over the years.
With multiple allegations of sexual abusers on the platform, rampant racial and sexual harassment, and other controversial issues involving Twitch users, many have called for more consistent and watchful moderation across the site. Thankfully, that's an area that Twitch has increasingly delivered on. In efforts to satisfy the communities calling out the platform's issues, Twitch has released multiple waves of bans targeting offenders of their terms of service, with the latest now targeting a different kind of culprit.
Announced by Twitch Support on Twitter, the site has just banned over 7.5 million accounts that engaged in bot activities to inflate follower and viewer counts for streamers. These accounts were "detected through ongoing machine learning technology" and promptly removed from the site completely, creating a large sitewide drop in bot activity. Twitch defines these behaviors as "artificial inflation of channel statistics, such as views or follows, through coordination or 3rd party tools." The help link provided by Twitch Support also notifies streamers of the potential dip in follower and viewer counts following such a large wave of bans and promises safety to the innocent people who were targeted but not responsible for the bot accounts.
This last bit of news is especially important for those involved in the bot scandals, as oftentimes the streamers in question have been targeted by bot activity from other users without their action or knowledge. The Twitch help page has also disclosed several other forms of "fake engagement" that streamers may not be aware are against the terms of service, citing "Follow 4 Follow" (F4F), "Lurk 4 Lurk" (L4L), and "Host 4 Host (H4H)" as prime examples of offending and bannable streamer practices. Basically, any form of manipulation of the viewer and follower counts, whether by bots or mutual agreements, is a violation of Twitch's terms of service and "damaging to the community as a whole."
Seeing the recent waves of bans and calls for updates to Twitch's rules, it's easy to think that the platform is on top of its problems and critics, but there's still a long way to go. The platform's new show of force demonstrates both the necessity for Twitch's continuous evolution as a platform and its ability to enforce the large-scale changes required to combat the site's leading issues.
Sources: TwitchSupport/Twitter, Twitch