Lady Gaga loses 156M YouTube views in latest crackdown

Lady Gaga joins Beyonce, Chris Brown, and Michael Jackson as artists whose YouTube channels had artificially inflated views struck from the video site’s coveted counts. It’s as if 156 million voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

As NME notes, it’s likely not her fault. Fans and hackers will often inflate the counts using automated video viewing techniques to either support or attempt to get the artists in trouble. There are other factors taken into account during these sweeps, including auto-play views that YouTube doesn’t like to count. If someone didn’t specifically hit play, YouTube doesn’t consider it a view.

The move came after the site conducted an audit of its viewing figures and suspected view count building techniques from hackers, who were allegedly artificially boosting views on certain videos.

The eccentric musician escaped the first round of count corrections last month when the site killed off over 2 billion views from various artists.