Sunday 30th December 2012 by Grace Carroll

YouTube has cancelled billions of music video views, as part of cracking down on hackers.

The website called it an enforcement of their viewcount policy, and the move saw Universal Records lose one billion views, with Sony losing more than 850 million.

YouTube said that they were trying to combat 'black hat' techniques, which is when hackers artificially inflate the views on a video, to make them seem more popular than they would otherwise be.

They said, "This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our viewcount policy."

However, some of the record labels have said that they think it's down to the fact that they are moving their videos onto other websites.

Universal told The Daily Dot that their YouTube channel has been mostly dormant since it started to focus its videos on Vevo instead.

Universal previously had dozens of videos on its channel and is now left with five, none of which are music videos. Sony also lost videos, with just three left on the channel.

Leona Lewis has lost statistics on her YouTube account page

And Leona Lewis lost nearly 24 million page views on her account.

The crackdown also saw hundreds of users claiming that they had their videos deleted due to a violation of YouTube's terms of service.

Item 4, Section H of YouTube's Terms of Service bans artifically inflating view counts.

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