Twitch is about to go to court as the video content streaming service is suing seven of the most active sellers of online viewbot services in a bid to stop popularity boosting.
The reason for Twitch’s actions is simple. Online viewbot services, as the name implies, artificially inflates a user acccount’s followers, which causes said account to appear much more popular than they are. Seeing as Twitch does sign on popular channels to be an official partner, which allows the user to earn money based on viewership, there are people out there who would exploit the system in order to either get signed on as an official partner, or to boost their income.
So far, Twitch has been monitoring and banning users who are suspected to have used any online viewerbot services. Now though, Twitch is going after the services itself and is targeting seven individuals and their services. While Twitch is taking a proactive approach to stamp out viewerbots, the site admits that the only way that view inflation will stop is that users themselves stop utilising viewerbot services.
Source: Twitch Blog