We’ve seen a couple of comments about how our systems detect inauthentic views that aren’t accurate, and so I want to clarify a few things. As I said in my original post, it is important to understand that the technology that we use to detect invalid traffic for ads is separate from what we use for computing ACCV. Viewbots are just one form of invalid traffic. Advertisers are not charged for invalid impressions and creators do not get paid out for any of these impressions. Now you may ask, "why are there two systems"? The reason is that it is harder to detect viewbots in real time. There are a number of different signals that we can use after the fact to detect invalid traffic for advertising that are harder to use for real time detection. As we filter out bots in real time, we need to be sure we are not filtering out real viewers. In fact, the viewbot detection tools we just rolled out went through a lot of edits. In an earlier version, as we dug deeper, we found that the tool was being overly aggressive and not counting valid traffic from various sources. So, we worked to narrow the scope of the change. As we have said, we are rolling out the update gradually right now so that we can monitor it and make sure there are not any issues or mistakes. The second point I want to make is around enforcement actions. Taking enforcement action against viewbots is complicated, as it can be difficult to conclusively determine if an individual streamer is responsible for the viewbots on their channel. Now, I do expect that most of the viewbotting that we see on channels is being driven by the channel owner. However if we were to suspend someone for viewbotting, then the easiest way to attack someone on Twitch and get them suspended would be to send viewbots their way. What we can do – with a lot more precision – is identify the viewbots themselves. That is what we work hard to detect and remove from Twitch. Viewbotting is not unique to Twitch and in fact is a problem across social media. While historically, we've been able to address this problem for advertisers on Twitch, viewbotting was still a challenge for direct sponsorships. We rolled out these updates, in part, to address the direct sponsorships issue. We’re talking openly about the changes we’re making because we think it is an important conversation. I have seen some numbers shared on social media about the number of top creators that are viewbotting and I can tell you that those numbers are just flat out wrong. I don’t know when or how they did their study, but the numbers they shared do not reflect what we see on the service. This is an ongoing challenge for the broader social media industry, and we are focused on building solutions and improving our detection tools, as we did this week.

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