Facebook Gaming appears to be overrun by spam and pirated content

engadget.com:

Last fall, Streamlabs published a report indicating that Facebook Gaming had overtaken YouTube Gaming to become the second-most popular platform by hours watched, just behind Twitch. In January, StreamElements reported the platform had its best month ever, hitting a new peak of 617 million hours of monthly watch time. Reports like these have raised eyebrows for some, as Facebook has struggled to attract high-profile streamers, despite its significant investments in live gaming.

But data from CrowdTangle, the company’s analytics service, raises serious questions about the state of Facebook Gaming. Though the platform has snagged some notable names like Neymar Jr. and StoneMountain64, their streams didn’t appear at the top of rankings. Nor do any of the streamers identified by Streamlabs as the most-watched creators on the platform. Instead it’s a jumble of generically named pages that call themselves gaming creators, but behave more like spammers, often posting pirated movie clips or nonsensical videos disguised as live gaming streams.

These pages inexplicably rack up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of interactions on streams with ridiculous-sounding titles like “car vs. giant bulge” or “this ship is full of passengers.” And while most streams contained some actual gaming footage, they often began with pirated clips from popular movies or other completely unrelated content. Despite Facebook's clear policies on spam and non-gaming content, some of these accounts are still in Facebook’s Level Up or Partner programs, which allows them to sell fan subscriptions and access other monetization features.

To try to assess the biggest streamers on Facebook Gaming, we used Facebook’s CrowdTangle analytics tool to search for