You’re having fun streaming when suddenly you get bombarded with follows that are clearly fake. You’re being follow-botted. What should you do in this situation? Read on to find out.
Be Chill
Whoever is follow-botting your channel wants you to panic, so don’t. Twitch will not take action against you if you’re not the one doing this. Keep your cool and follow these simple steps.
During the Stream
Your neat follow alert is now going off non-stop and your chat is unreadable due to the flood of “Thanks for the Follow!” messages. Turn off follow and chat alerts temporarily to keep them from taking over the stream. Here’s how to do this with the two most popular alert sites:
StreamElements
On the left side of your dashboard under Bot, select Modules and toggle off chat alerts if you had them on.
Next, head over to Alerts & Overlays, My Overlays and edit the overlay you’re using on your stream. Click on settings for the alert box and uncheck Follower Alert.
Streamlabs
On your dashboard under Stream Essentials, select Alert Box, Follows and disable them.
Next, go to Cloudbot, Modules and either toggle off Chat Alerts or select Preferences and toggle off Follow.
This will keep disruptions to a minimum while you are being follow-botted. As this seems to be the primary objective of those using this method to harass streamers, it will likely discourage them from continuing this activity.
Let Your Viewers Know
Be sure to let your viewers know you’re being follow-botted, but do so in a calm manner. Remember, there’s no need to panic and doing so only serves whoever is trying to harm you with this in the first place. Follow-botting is usually accompanied by view-bots as well, which may inflate your viewer count dramatically. This is why it’s important to let your real viewers know that you’re aware and dealing with it.
After the Stream
Your stream is over, you handled the situation well, but now you have a crazy amount of bot followers. What can you do? Twitch periodically removes bot accounts from the site, so you can wait for them to do that. If it doesn’t sit well with you to have an inflated follower number, there are steps you can take to rid your channel of the pesky bots before Twitch gets to them.
Twitch Tools by CommanderRoot
With Twitch Tools, CommanderRoot provides an easy way to sort followers and remove them if need be. Head over to https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/follower_remover.php# Take note of when you got the flood of follow-bots and try narrowing it down to a specific time span. It should be easy to spot the large influx of back-to-back follows.
Apply filters and you’ll see the accounts that followed your channel during the time you entered in. You can then Remove those listed and voila, you’re back to your real follower count.
Report User if Known
If you know the user who is doing this to your channel, be sure to take screenshots and report them to Twitch. Otherwise, take the above steps and the follow-botting should stop. Follow-botting on Twitch is only worth it to trolls if it gets a strong reaction, which you won’t give because you’re calm and collected, remember?
If you have a hard time keeping your composure in the face of stream problems, be sure to check out this article about how to stay positive on stream!
