New US view-botting laws are causing some streamers to fire up LinkedIn for the first time

You’ve probably mumbled, “There’s no way this streamer has 20,000 viewers” ​​for yourself at one point. And now, we may soon find out if that’s true thanks to new regulations unveiled today by the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC has published a “final” ruling on buying AI product reviews and comments, strictly banning the practice in the U.S. While most of the rules focus on product reviews and testimonials, there is an interesting addition regarding 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.”

That certainly seems to imply that the number of stream viewers is up, as companies and esports organizations often tout their total viewership numbers to media companies and potential investors. If true, it could mean that American streamers who use view-botting need to get their act together, fast.

Just today, a press release and blog post by Stream Hatchet praised 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 control bot accounts to inflate viewer numbers, intentionally obscures real viewer numbers and can allow streamers and organizations who purchase such bots to artificially inflate their reach on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kickstarter.

View-botting has been a controversial practice for some time now. Accusations of botting are often leveled at popular streamers who seem suspicious, or from one outraged streamer to another content creator during a feud.

Streamers who bot often have a large viewer count but little to no chat activity, as well as strange underlying performance indicators like not gaining or losing followers despite being at the top of a gaming category on a given platform. If someone has thousands of real people watching their stream, they should almost certainly have an active chat, and no follower or subscriber activity is just plain weird. Either they’ve created the weirdest streaming community in existence, or they might actually be botting.

So if you see a streamer’s ratings suddenly and drastically drop in the coming months, it can be food for thought about the validity of those viewers. And all it took was for the government to potentially make it illegal.