YouTube bug is allowing people to upload ‘undeletable’ porn videos

People looking for adult content on YouTube have discovered that they were able to view and host porn videos on the platform, which is scrambling to delete them.

This is happening thanks to a bug that the Alphabet-owned platform is unable to resolve despite taking action.

404Media news outlet uncovered that a group of self-proclaimed "YouTube hackers" were able to get around the platform’s content moderation rules to upload explicit videos.

These porn videos encompassed hentai and videos featuring well-known adult actress "Sweetie Fox."

In some cases, they were able to lift videos straight out of pornographic websites like Pornhub and transfer them to YouTube.

Bypassing algorithms

A reporter from 404Media, Emanuel Maiberg, was the first one to discover such an anomaly.

To understand how the hackers were able to bypass the algorithms, he joined a Discord group called "YouTube porn hunters”—a group that shares pornographic content.

One of the users told 404Media that they could bypass YouTube’s algorithm by exploiting the video tagging system—the field where users can add tags to the video when uploading.

They use something called a “newline” character, which YouTube rarely counts as an actual character. It is essentially what is written when you press the enter key on your keyboard. Users spammed millions of these characters in the video tags. This prevented the visibility of these videos.

Another user shared a text (.txt) file that contains 4 million of these newline characters, claiming that it can be used to upload “undeletable” videos to YouTube.

YouTube cracksdown

Though YouTube has since cracked down on such videos, the platform is struggling to find all of the videos that were uploaded using this technique.

A YouTube spokesperson told 404Media that they are aware the situation, and trying to remove all the explicit videos that have been uploaded.

“We’re aware that a small number of videos may have remained on YouTube following a channel termination. We’re working to fix this and remove the content from the platform,” said YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon to Maiberg, admitting to the difficulty.

(With inputs from agencies)

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