Twitch.tv punishes view bot maker with a lawsuit

Twitch has had it with bots that unnaturally increase view counts for videos. The game-streaming company is now handing out lawsuits to programmers of these bots.

In a post published on Twitch’s Blog, Friday, Matthew DiPietro, Twitch’s senior v.p. of promoting, revealed how the company is attempting to fight bogus view counts. On top of the current measures Twitch takes—such as human moderation and technical actions to eliminate view-count inflation—the company stated that it would sue “seven of the most active sellers” of the fake view bots.

In Twitch’s official complaint, which it filed with the United States District Court in San Jose, the company details the bot tools as “illicit and illegal,” and says that, “these deceptive actions inflate viewer statistics for some channels while harming legitimate broadcaster channels by decreasing their discoverability.”

“That, in turn, hurts the quality of the experience community members have come to expect from Twitch,” the claim adds.

Twitch’s declaring also clarifies how manipulating the system with bots causes harm to other streamers who use the site legally, and “make it harder for Twitch users to discover legitimate broadcasters and for those broadcasters to succeed.”