Are you like that Irish ‘gangsta’ Yasha Swag and tried to jack up your YouTube viewcount with an extra million or so hits? Well, YouTube has just put you in your place.
The video-sharing service has flexed its muscles and taken down all videos that have violated the site’s terms of service regarding view manipulation, Pigeons and Planes reports.
On top of that, YouTube has also wiped millions of views off videos uploaded by record companies, including Universal, Sony/BMG and RCA – as they believe some of their videos have been violated by view manipulators as well.
One of Sony’s channels – based in the US – has been stripped bare with no videos to its name, while Universal lost a total of one billion views across its channel, and had its video collection trimmed significantly.
The Daily Dot reports that the mass view cull came on the same day that hundreds of YouTubers took to Google forums to inform their peers that they’d been subject to a series of video takedowns for violations of YouTube’s Terms of Service.
Some of these thought the actions were a technical error, but a rep from YouTube’s parent company Google confirmed on various forums that the users had violated an item in their Terms of Service, which bans automated methods of inflating viewcounts.
“This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our viewcount policy,” the representative wrote.
