People seeking adult content on YouTube have discovered that they can watch and host pornographic videos on the platform, even if those videos get removed. This issue persists due to a bug that Alphabet-owned YouTube has been unable to address, despite taking measures to do so.
The news outlet 404Media exposed a group of self-proclaimed “YouTube hackers” who found a way to bypass the platform’s content moderation rules to upload explicit videos. These videos included hentai and content featuring well-known adult actress “Sweetie Fox.” In some instances, they even took videos directly from pornographic websites like Pornhub and transferred them to YouTube.
To understand how these hackers were able to circumvent YouTube’s algorithms, 404Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg joined a Discord group named “YouTube porn hunters,” a group that shares pornographic content. One user in this group revealed that they could bypass YouTube’s algorithm by exploiting the video tagging system, which allows users to add tags to their videos during the upload process.
They used a “newline” character, which YouTube rarely counted as an actual character. This character is typically generated when the Enter key is pressed on a keyboard. Users flooded the video tags with millions of these newline characters, effectively preventing the videos from being visible to most users.
YouTube’s inability to prevent the uploading and hosting of pornographic content, despite its content moderation efforts, highlights a significant issue with the platform’s security and algorithmic controls. This loophole not only allows explicit content to remain on the platform but also poses risks to unsuspecting viewers, as they may come across adult content without expecting it.
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