YouTube accidentally allows users to upload unremovable adult content
YouTube has accidentally allowed hackers to upload porn thanks to a glitch in their tagging system.
YouTube accidentally allowed users to upload porn.
The video-sharing website does not usually allow users to upload adult content but thanks to a bug discovered on the platform, a small group of users discovered a way to upload it permanently by using hidden tags, according to an investigation by 404.
A user explained to the outlet: "The way the bug worked was by using something called a newline, which YouTube very rarely counts as an actual character. It’s basically what is written when you type the return key on your keyboard. By spamming millions of these characters in the videos tags, using a proxy, it would prevent visibility changes on the video, such as setting it from public to private, or deleting it all together. initially discovered the bug by just messing around with new lines video settings. It’s been well known inside of the little YouTube community we have—not the porn one in [404 Media’s] article, that type of crap is vile and weird—that new lines could be used for getting certain things over the character limit, such as channel descriptions and sometimes names. I tried video descriptions titles and it didn’t work. But for video tags, it did."
The Google-owned platform has been made aware of the issue and is said to be "working" to resolve it.
A spokesperson told The Messenger: "We are 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."
