Is Lady Gaga's dominance in social media crashing and burning? Is the singer manipulating stats to make her 'Fame' seem bigger than it is?

Fresh off her recent plummet to the person with the second most followers on Twitter, as Justin Bieber swooped in and usurped her throne, Gaga saw the powers-that-be at YouTube remove anywhere from 156 to 176 million fake views from her VEVO channel.

Now that's not a Gaga-exclusive problem in the slightest. Universal Music Group, the company that owns Gaga's label Interscope, was stripped of cumulative view counts on its channels. So Gaga is not the only artist with false views yanked from their counts.

However, summer reports indicated that more than half of her millions of her Twitter followers were either fake, inactive or bot-generated accounts. She also released 'Born This Way' on Amazon for 99 cents, which was seen as a cheap way to sell more copies and grab a No. 1 first week out.

So her social media figures are not all they are cracked up to be.

That said, a source familiar with and close to Gaga shot down the notion that she sits around dreaming up ways to falsify her social media stats. Right, she probably has people on her payroll and her staff to do that, but still.

"Lady Gaga is not involved with any fake YouTube views. She is not involved with any fake Twitter followers. She spends hours a day with her charity and performances. She is also recording a new album which people say may be one of the biggest albums in history. She has far more important things on her mind than manipulating YouTube and Twitter," a source told Examiner.

Nice spin there.

Where there's a social media stat, there will be a manipulation and a way to inflate and exaggerate it. We doubt Gaga spends her time trying to thumb the social media scale. Even if she was, or was authorizing her team to do so, she's certainly not the only one engaging in such behavior.

Watch the Lady Gaga 'You & I' Video

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