Justin Bieber Fuels Bot Viewer Controversy: Are Top Streamers Like Kai Cenat Inflating Their Numbers?

Justin Bieber hopped on Twitch this week to shoot hoops, play pool, and wander around his warehouse-turned-studio. What he did not plan for: becoming Exhibit A in a very nerdy debate about whether Twitch view counts are real or just smoke and bots.

Bieber on Twitch: Small crowd, big fuss

Bieber went live on October 22, 2025. The debut was low-key and about an hour long. He also told viewers he plans to do this regularly:

'We are going to be doing this pretty much every day, so make sure you tune in. It is going to be awesome.'

Two days later, screenshots from his October 24 stream started circulating because the peak topped out at 8,880 viewers. For a guy with 100+ million followers on X, that number felt tiny to some people and instantly became ammo for bot accusations against Twitch heavyweights like Kai Cenat.

Reactions ranged from reasonable to torch-and-pitchfork. Fitness influencer Myron Gaines argued on October 24 that if an A-lister like Bieber can not crack 10k live, big Twitch channels must be juicing their numbers. Another user, @WhizKick, suggested advertisers should be furious if view counts are inflated. @Rekapzz snarked that Kai Cenat spending a month asking for donations apparently outruns one of the most-followed stars on Instagram, often by 10x or 20x. Others chimed in with their longtime suspicion of certain streamers pulling 10,000 viewers on games no one watches, and one user just flatly asked if anyone really thought thousands were tuning in for folks like Sneako or Neon. Not exactly subtle.

The bot question, and what Twitch actually changed

Here is where the timing matters. Back in August 2025, Twitch quietly pushed new code aimed at nuking viewbots — fake viewers used to pad numbers and woo advertisers (Forbes reported the rollout). Within weeks, analyst Zach Bussey said the site’s top 5,000 streamers logged their lowest-performing streams of the year, with viewership down anywhere from 5% to 22% depending on the channel.

Twitch pushed back, saying overall viewership was not in a tailspin. Still, the pattern was hard to ignore. Félix Lengyel (xQc) observed that creators tied to big content collectives took the hardest hit, which he read as a sign that paid boosting was more common in those circles. Then came a broader data point: Steam Charts analyst Nazar Babenko flagged more than 41,000 Twitch channels showing clear, persistent signs of viewbotting — a number that, if accurate, implies serious wasted ad spend and a trust problem for smaller creators trying to compete.

Bussey later noted some channels recovered a bit. Twitch, for its part, said it did not roll anything back and that the cat-and-mouse continues.

'No rollbacks' were made, and 'viewbotter services work hard to evade detection,' a Twitch spokesperson said.

So Bieber’s sub-10k peak might not be proof of anything on its own — celebrity follower counts rarely translate 1:1 to live stream concurrency — but the number landed right in the middle of Twitch’s anti-bot cleanup and reignited the conversation anyway.

• Oct 22, 2025: Bieber’s Twitch debut (basketball, billiards, studio tour; roughly an hour; says he will stream often)
• Oct 24, 2025: Peak concurrent shown in screenshots at 8,880; social media debate erupts
• Aug 2025: Twitch rolls out anti-viewbot code (per Forbes)
• Weeks after rollout: Analyst Zach Bussey reports 5%–22% viewership drops across many top channels; Twitch disputes overall decline
• Nazar Babenko (Steam Charts): Over 41,000 channels show consistent viewbotting signals

Meanwhile, Bieber is headlining Coachella 2026

While all that was brewing online, Bieber’s offline plans are huge. Coachella announced its 2026 lineup in September, and he is one of the headliners alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Anyma, and Karol G. He is scheduled for April 11 and April 18, 2026.

He even teased prep during his stream: he is working up a big show and using the lead-up to get inspired.

Money side: Rolling Stone reported he negotiated the deal himself — $10 million total, $5 million per weekend. That makes this a flex on two fronts: a major festival slot and a self-managed negotiation. A source close to the deal pitched it as a massive, generation-defining production built end-to-end by Bieber. Between that and the recent success of his project Swag, the message is pretty clear: he wants full control of this next phase.

For Coachella history buffs: this will be Bieber’s first time headlining, but he has popped up before — with Ariana Grande in 2019, Daniel Caesar in 2022, and Tems in 2024.

So, what do the numbers really mean?

It is entirely possible for a mainstream star to pull modest live numbers on Twitch and still be genuine — different platform, different audience habits. It is also true that Twitch has been chasing fake engagement and that some metrics dropped after the crackdown. Both things can be true at once.

Does Bieber’s 8,880 peak prove big streamers are botted? No. Did it pour gasoline on a fire that has been burning since August? Absolutely. Drop your take below.