Lady Gaga stripped of 156m YouTube views

I'll be the first to admit I don't entirely understand what's going on in this story, but it's probably not that good for Lady Gaga and the other artists involved. The news that labels have been dispatching bots and hackers to artificially inflate the view counts on YouTube is no surprise, but for the channel to take this kind of action definitely sounds like a sinister rumble.

Lady Gaga has had 156m views struck off her official YouTube account today just one month after the online video provider reduced the play counts of many major label acts by 2 billion views. 
At the time of the first purge in December 2012, a YouTube spokesman told Billboard magazine that the removed views occurred when YouTube cleaned out all of the views that had once been uploaded to individual artists YouTube channels but had subsequently been replaced and were showing up on their VEVO channels instead.
However, the Lady Gaga view removal did not affect her YouTube channel with all 156m views being removed from the star's VEVO channel. Speaking at the time of the initial removal, a YouTube spokesperson stated the reasons behind the clear-up. "This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our viewcount policy."
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. 
VEVO is a music video website owned and operated by Sony Music Entertainment and UMG inside YouTube. Artists affected by the clear up besides Lady Gaga include Michael Jackson, Chris Brown and Beyonce.