Funny story, Twitch.tv actually has a similar problem and they seemingly have solved it.
On Twitch, "Followers" is a tracked and important metric for streamers (publishers). Therefore there's obviously a lot of benefit to buying fake bot followers and inflating your count.
However, sometimes misguided fans of streamers will buy bot followers for them intending to be helpful (or even to spam them with inappropriately named followers).
From Twitch.tv's perspective, tracking down who issued the bot followers is of paramount importance since they have an interest in preventing gaming of the system without catching innocent streamers in the crossfire.
Twitch actually maintains a help page on what to do when you're being spammed by followers, and it includes a statement that they won't punish people who haven't paid for spam. In my experience, whatever mechanisms they're using under the hood seem to be reasonably effective - I have yet to see someone incorrectly banned for this.
I have yet to see someone incorrectly banned for this.
Because they barely ever ban bots, even the most obvious ones.
I've seen streamers get follow and spam botted by thousands or tens of thousands of accounts within hours or minutes. All accounts had random character names and were created within a couple hours of each other.
All reported multiple times by multiple people over months yet no action at all. I have lists with a total of 60k clear and obvious bots reported to Twitch over and over again even by the partnered streamers affected and all were completely ignored and the accounts still alive.
I've been a mod for a couple big streamers for a while and it's absolutely crazy how many reports of follow and spam bots, blatant abuse and ToS infractions Twitch completely ignores. Especially in the last year or so it just keeps getting worse.
I would really not list them as a good example of dealing with bots in any way.
It's quite possible that twitch is able to identify a bot follower vs non-bot. But by keeping this breakdown secret, they've taken away any feedback mechanism the botters can use to monetize their bot followers. For example, you'd likely not get into the twitch partner program by simply just adding bot followers (which means you can't generate revenue from ads on twitch).
To avoid bots from inflating viewers, they have banned non-partnered/affiliate channels from appearing in the directory if they have above a certain amount of viewers.
While this solves the bot problem, it ensures that new channels will never become popular. Because if you begin to become popular, your channel will literally disappear and you cannot grow.
(And on a side note, there are a lot of large streamers today that admit they used bots to promote their channel when they were first starting out, years ago. Sometimes, gaming the system is the best way to win.)
Partnership/affiliation status is an almost automatic process that's tied to your metrics (hours streamed, etc), so it's not some hard cap on popularity.
> Partnership/affiliation status is an almost automatic process
Emphasis on almost. It requires an application and approval. Most importantly, being an affiliate/partner is not appealing to some people, since you have to sign an exclusivity contract.
They'll also force you to play a certain amount of ads. I've watched some streamers who wouldn't show any ads because they were making enough money on subscriptions and donations that they didn't want to make anyone watch them. Within the past year though, they've said that twitch told them they need to start showing ads, so they'll tell everyone to take a bathroom break or turn on an adblocker for the next couple of minutes.
The process is also rather arbitrary. If a streamer has barely any viewers but is a friend of a popular streamer, they'll get partnered almost immediately, but a "nobody" streamer that regularly has hundreds of viewers will get denied until they've been streaming for a long time. They'll also ban you if you tell anyone why you were denied.
Where have you heard/read about this? I've seen cases where twitch streamers have super obvious bots watching, literally thousands of them, and Twitch did nothing.
It used to be a very large problem for the 2007scape streamers, I imagine it was solved with a mix of legally prosecuting serious offenders via de-anonymizing the bot networks, as well as a tighter feedback loop of reporting and banning them - effectively making it more of a hassle to setup than its worth, which is saying a lot because the types of people doing those activities have A LOT of free time.
IANAL, but at least on the /2007scape streams the viewbots were used to pump up numbers on fake streams linking to phishing sites (which presumably is an illegal activity in most countries).
For other content, it can be seen as a loss of income for the streamer if they are demonetized due to viewbots, and for those where it isn't - it is effectively ad fraud since Twitch revenue is based on those engagement numbers
A few false negatives is generally manageable and in the noise. If I have one bot follower who cares - if it is significant to me that means I'm small (5 follows 4 real - nobody cares about me), or I'm so big that the one doesn't matter (100,000 vs 99,999 real - I'd probably cross 100,000 in a few days anyway)
If you're nearing the top of becoming "the most famous" on these platforms, buying fake followers for your competitors -- to get them removed so you ranked higher -- well, that's quite a novel concept. Certainly not ethical, but I'd imagine it'd be quite difficult to track down who actually purchased the fake followers. How do you prove you didn't buy something?
The same rules don't apply to top streamers. Smaller streamers will get banned for playing copyrighted music, but the most popular streamers can break the law, "accidentally" wear see-through pants on stream, etc., and they'll get a couple day ban at most.
On Twitch, "Followers" is a tracked and important metric for streamers (publishers). Therefore there's obviously a lot of benefit to buying fake bot followers and inflating your count.
However, sometimes misguided fans of streamers will buy bot followers for them intending to be helpful (or even to spam them with inappropriately named followers).
From Twitch.tv's perspective, tracking down who issued the bot followers is of paramount importance since they have an interest in preventing gaming of the system without catching innocent streamers in the crossfire.
Twitch actually maintains a help page on what to do when you're being spammed by followers, and it includes a statement that they won't punish people who haven't paid for spam. In my experience, whatever mechanisms they're using under the hood seem to be reasonably effective - I have yet to see someone incorrectly banned for this.