A new investigation shows that YouTube has a bug that allows users to upload hardcore pornography to its platform. To make matters funnier, it isn’t exactly clear that YouTube knows how to fix the bug or that it is capable of taking down all the explicit material that has been uploaded.
404 Media reports that a group of so-called “YouTube hackers” have made it their mission to flood the Google-owned video hosting platform with as much hardcore pornography as possible. In some cases, the digital smut peddlers have been responsible for transferring videos directly from Pornhub to YouTube, including hentai and videos featuring the popular adult actress “Sweetie Fox.”
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To investigate this phenomenon, 404 reporter Emanuel Maiberg says he joined a Discord group of YouTube “porn hunters”—users dedicated to finding and sharing NSFW material on the platform—and tried to figure out how hackers were getting around the site’s content moderation algorithms. Like most major social media platforms, YouTube largely forbids adult material. However, the site allows a certain amount of nudity—as long as it’s deemed “educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic” in nature. Of course, it’d be hard to argue that most hardcore pornography falls into that category.
Maiberg found that, to skirt the platform’s rules, some hackers appeared to be exploiting a bug in YouTube’s video tagging system. A how-to video revealing the inner workings of this exploit was uploaded to YouTube but was later deleted by the platform; however, the video’s creator, a user by the name of “</Angeled>,” also shared it with Maiberg. The video, which is reproduced in the 404 article, shows that users can basically spam YouTube’s tag function with millions of special characters—known as new line characters. This produces a video that has none of the traditional identifiers that most YT videos require—like a channel or video title, or video stats, like likes, shares, and so on. Creating such a video appears to make it quite difficult for YouTube to track down and delete the video in question.
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After a certain amount of buzz about the bug on social media, a large number of the videos that were produced with the exploit were deleted, Maiberg says, but not all of them were. Most interestingly, Google has been pretty cagey about the problem and whether it’s been totally fixed or not. When Maiberg contacted the company’s team to address the problem, a Google spokesperson told him they would need a link to a specific video for them to do anything about it. Maiberg subsequently sent a link to a video produced with the exploit and it was quickly removed, he said.
Google followed up with a vague response about the problem: “We’re aware that a small number of videos may have remained on YouTube following a channel termination,” a company spokesperson said. “We’re working to fix this and remove the content from the platform.”
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