Porn on YouTube! Bug enables users to upload ‘undeletable’ pornographic videos: Report

YouTube, the world's largest video streaming platform, owned by Google, has faced a recent challenge as some users exploited a bug on the site to upload explicit content, according to reports. What's surprising is that these ‘porn’ videos remained on the platform even after the accounts that uploaded them were deleted.

You heard him folks

Stop trying to submit porn, seriously I've seen multiple people posting sexually explicit YT thumbnails in his replies just to try and get it submitted pic.twitter.com/l4aLT324st

— Jordan Shackelford (@JordanShackelf4) September 26, 2023

The exploitation was made possible by tricking YouTube’s video labelling algorithm. Users commonly utilised a ‘newline’ character which YouTube frequently doesn’t count as a real character. Users flooded the video tags with millions of these characters, making the videos virtually invisible.

In a discord channel known for sharing explicit content links, a user shared a ‘.txt’ file containing 4 million newline characters, claiming they could be used to upload ‘undeletable’ videos to YouTube.

YouTube's response

While YouTube has since fixed the bug, it has faced challenges in removing all the videos already uploaded using this technique. Some have been deleted, but many remain.

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.

Jack Malon, YouTube's Spokesperson

This incident underscores the ongoing challenge of content moderation for platforms like YouTube, striving to maintain a safe and appropriate environment for all users.