Gerry Palmers Games 03.04.2022 20:Mar PM EST

Facebook Gaming Used as a Vehicle for Spam and Pirated Content

Facebook Games has emerged to be one of the top platforms for gaming live streams, but fresh data from the social media monolith's analytics service reveal serious concerns about its current state.

CrowdTangle data showed that instead of notable streamers dominating the platform, a flurry of genetically named pages identifying themselves as gaming creators, yet behave like spammers, post pirated films or silly if not ludicrous videos being disguised as live gaming streams, Engadget reported.

These questionable content have since racked up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of interactions with such nonsensical titles as "this ship is full of passengers" or "car vs. giant bulge". While these streams showed actual gaming footage, they start with bootlegged clips from famous movies and other ridiculous content.

Despite Facebook's very clear rules prohibiting spam and non-gaming content, these accounts have also been part of the company's Level Up or Partner programs, which allow them to market fan subscriptions or access other monetization options.

Facebook Gaming Overtakes YouTube Gaming as Second Most Watched Platform for Live Gaming Streams

This comes as a Streamlabs report revealed that Facebook Gaming had zoomed past YouTube Gaming as the second most watched platform for live gaming streams, with Twitch still lording over the market. In another report, StreamElements emphasized that Facebook Gaming performed its best in January this year, reaching a peak of 617 million hours of watch time.

These reports have surprised some observers since Facebook has found it difficult in enlisting high-profile streamers to its fold, even with increased investments in live gaming.

To determine the most watched streamers on Facebook Gaming, Engadget used CrowdTangle to look up for live videos having the most interactions from creator pages for a month-long period. It noted its search was made from January 16 to February 15, 2022. They found out that among the ten most watched streams, nine of them utilized bizarre methods, such as loading gaming footage with pirated movie clips, a usual activity of spammers. And most of these posts, Engadget further said, appeared to violate Facebook's monetization policies. It further said more than half of these streams showed pirated movie clips or unauthentic non-gaming content.

Streams With Pirated Content Garner Hundreds of Millions of Views

As per CrowdTangle's data, the most watched video was from a gaming creator page named "AU." The 22-minuyr stream last February 2 titled "Cars vs Giant Crater - Giant Pit", which has since been deleted, garnered an astounding 112 million views. While the stream was supposed to livestream the car simulator game "BeamNG.drive", it carried an unauthorized clip of the Hong Kong film "Cook Up a Storm" in the first 11 minutes of the video. In the 11-minute mark of the video, the stream abruptly transitioned to footage from the car simulator game.

The Engadget report also said AU frequently posts such streams showing pirated films disguised as the vehicle simulator game. It had actually posted a separate stream on February 2 with exactly the same title, this time running 12 hours, with no voiceover or hints that anyone is playing it, that got 66,000 views and just 13 comments. But it then posted yet another 22-minute video on the same day that received over 13 million views-a video which had an 11-minute pirated clip of the Bengali movie "Amazon Obhijaan."

Other streams in the list also showed questionable non-gaming content wherein such had been tagged as gaming content, which goes against Facebook policy. The company had indicated initiatives to "identify and demote" videos that are being tagged as a game but show non-gameplay content. These "gaming creators" are doing these tactics obviously to "artificially gain reach" on Facebook Gaming. Facebook said it would remove these gaming creators from their Partner or Level Up status, but until now, despite their obvious violations, they have not removed the videos from the platform.