Twitch has announced that they will be multiplying their efforts in dealing with both viewer bot suppliers and buyers.

The popular streaming service has been making several updates to their terms of use. Any Twitch streamer caught using bots for the purpose of artificially inflating their viewer, rating, or popularity could be looking at a lifetime ban or even a lawsuit.

And to show that they do mean business, TwitchTV will already be taking legal action against seven bot services which are well-known among the communities.

Statistics currently show that viewer-bots are used by a small percentage of the entirety of streamers, but Twitch believes that any form of artificial popularity boosting has powerful damaging effects on both viewers and streamers.

Twitch enjoys partnering up with popular streamers. A partnership with Twitch means that the streamers’ viewers will proportionally influence how much of a profit the streamer makes. The extra profit motivates the streamers to broadcast high-quality content, and the high-quality content increases Twitch’s popularity, bringing along more viewers for everyone.

If a streamer buys viewer-bots to increase their popularity, they can be seen as stealing from Twitch. The streamer is making profits based on a fake viewership number, but this is not actually TwitchTV’s pet peeve.

The illegitimate streamer will not be motivated to release high-quality content because they are not motivated to keep their viewers, knowing they will have a high number of viewers anyway. The streamer is also occupying a slot in the popular streamers section, pushing new streamers further down the list and denying them the chance to be found by viewers faster.

TwitchTV engineers have been developing new faster, discreet, and efficient tools to help them search for and kick all view-bots and chatbots. Their platform, Twitch said, will continue to improve and update until they deal with the issue entirely.

The streaming service is also appealing individually to channel moderators to do their part and report any form of suspicious or unmotivated spike in viewership or any bogus or artificial chat activity.

They will also be suing seven of the most well-known bot makers and sellers. Twitch plans to open new lawsuits against any other bot creator or distributor they identify until their platform will be bot-free.

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