YouTube still cleaning up after “Porn Day” Campaign

Yesterday was proclaimed “Porn Day” on a couple of oh so brilliant sites and an image board; and as a result, YouTube was slammed with tons of explicit clips left and right.

Obviously, these clips violated their terms of use, and they were madly trying to remove them, but the people putting them up were doing so under names that didn’t exactly describe the content. This was infuriating to many, especially parents with kids viewing the site, given that a popular search word for many of the clips was “Jonas Brothers.” Really nice, dumb-wads. I’d like my ten-year old daughter searching out Joe Jonas and seeing that crap.

The way users are uploading the content is clearly a way to initially disguise content. At first glance it seems legit with 20-30 seconds of non-porn content like a newscast or interview, and then boom! Cover your eyes kiddos.

The problem lies also in the fact that even the videos that have been found and removed leave “residue,” because they still come up in searches and the very explicit thumbnails are still there for anyone to see. “It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site,” Google spokesperson Scott Rubin told Ars Technica. “Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable.”

At least the fact that many of the earliest porn-spammers all seemed to favor the same tags is making it easier for YouTube to find and remove the offending videos. Also, lots of them are posting links bragging about what they did on different forums.

“This group of pranksters thought it would be funny to load a bunch of porn to YouTube,” Rubin said. “This is an unfortunate, and I think poorly directed, prank. I think our systems are doing really well at removing content that violates the guidelines.”

via: arstechnica