Emiru flagged something unusual during her latest stream. While still displaying her “starting soon” screen, her viewer count rocketed to 22,000 within 20 minutes. She hadn’t even said hello yet.
Within just a couple of minutes of going live, she had 15,000 viewers watching her intro screen. By the three-minute mark, that number hit 18,000. For context, her streams typically build to around 11,000–15,000 viewers over the first 10–20 minutes.
“I’m getting botted,” Emiru said on stream, addressing the elephant in the room. She recognized the spike wasn’t normal for her channel’s growth pattern. Despite the suspicious activity, she continued streaming without any visible disruption.
The timing matters here. Twitch has been running periodic bot purges throughout 2025, trying to clean up fake engagement across the platform. Many channels have seen their numbers fluctuate as the platform filters out suspected bot accounts.
Third-party tracking sites like Streams Charts showed the unusual spike clearly. The sharp vertical climb in viewers during the intro screen stood out compared to her previous streams, where growth followed a more gradual curve. The difference wasn’t just in the final number but in how fast it got there.
Twitch hasn’t commented on this specific incident. The platform rarely discusses individual cases publicly, preferring to handle bot detection behind the scenes. Their advertiser-facing metrics supposedly filter out bot traffic, though the public viewer counts may still show inflated numbers until bots are detected and removed.
For streamers, getting botted creates a frustrating situation. Even if they’re not responsible, suspicious viewer patterns can damage their reputation. Many creators now publicly call out botting when they notice it, creating a record that they didn’t initiate or want the fake engagement.
