YouTube was caught with its pants down earlier this week. Users might have been surprised to find the site flooded with pornographic videos Wednesday in a prank orchestrated by 4chan users as part of its "Porn Day" initiative.
YouTube's user policy bans videos that feature nudity, and the site has already removed the videos.
4chan message board users organized on May 20 to flood the popular video sharing service with pornographic videos to protest YouTube's removal of music videos from the site, according to Ars Technica. The prank seems to have caught Google, the owner of YouTube, off guard.
Of course the content had to be disguised somehow in order to make past YouTube's initial filters. To that end, perpetrators of the porn prank tagged the XXX videos with keywords relating to popular children's stars, such as Hannah Montana or The Jonas Brothers. The films tended to start with a few seconds of non-porn, such as a newscast, before getting down and dirty.
While the videos were removed by YouTube as quickly as possible, many thumbnails of explicit images still remain on the site, where any casual browser can still see them, even if the videos aren't available.
"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."
YouTube's job to remove the covert smut films was made easier by the fact that many of the initial posts duplicated tags, such as "jonas brothers."
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