The source states that a group of users calling themselves “YouTube Hackers” set a goal: Fill your video hosting with as much hardcore pornography as possible. They already fulfill your plans by streaming videos directly from Pornhub. 404 Media reporter Emanuel Mayberg said he joined a Discord group where the people responsible for the attack met to find out how they managed to bypass the site’s content moderation algorithms.

Moderation issues

Like most major social networks, YouTube prohibits adult content. But the site A certain amount of nudity is allowed if it’s considered “educational, documentary, scientific or artistic” by nature. Mayberg discovered that unknowns were exploiting a bug in the video tagging system to bypass the rules.

The trick seems to be to use lots of special characters, known as newline characters, in the tags. This is the video’s channel or video name or likes, shares, etc. which is required for most videos on YT. resulting in it having none of the traditional descriptors such as statistics. Creating such a video makes it difficult for YouTube to track and remove it.

According to Myberg, after the bug generated some interest on social media, numerous videos created using the exploit were removed, but not all of them disappeared. Google does not provide any information about the problem and whether it has been completely resolved. When a reporter contacted the Google team to discuss the issue, a company representative told him that they needed a link to a specific video before they could do anything about it. Myberg later posted a link to a video created using this exploit, which was quickly removed.