YouTube is a site where you can find all sorts of video clips. From dogs on treadmills to Susan Boyle singing live, the whole gamut of entertainment is there for your viewing pleasure. Not quite. Porn, along with violence and other taboos, is banned. But some still gets through, especially when 4chan decides it’s Porn Day.

YouTube has had rather a tough time over the years keeping up with moderating the site. The main problem is that of copyrighted clips finding their way onto the stream of uploaded video clips. Which is why YouTube is being sued by Viacom and has had to improve the way it deals with DMCA takedown notices and the like.

However, videos containing footage which goes against YouTube’s terms of service are also a huge problem. Pornography and sexually explicit material is a definite problem, as is footage of crimes being committed and violence being acted out. YouTube does its best to deal with these clips as they appear on the site but when it is subject to a carpet bombing run by well-organized Internet pranksters the problems ramp up a little.

According to Ars Technica, members of 4chan and eBaum’s World decided that today (May 20) was ‘Porn Day’. The band of users, all technically proficient and keen to amuse themselves, have spent yesterday and today uploading porn videos to YouTube in an effort to overwhelm the search results and make sex a big part of the most popular online video site in the world.

The onslaught began yesterday and has continued all day today. YouTube has, inevitably, waged a fightback to try and stop the onslaught, but this effort has only been mildly successful. Although YouTube can quickly handle the obvious video clips, discovered by keywords or bragging on the forums, porn clips hidden in other more innocent videos are proving harder to rid the site of.

There’s also the problem that while the videos may be removed quickly, the search results will carry traces of the activity for days to come. Google spokesperson Scott Rubin said:

It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site. Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable.

4chan is no stranger to well-organized shows of power. The forum’s users have been responsible for many pranks over the years, the biggest of which must surely have been when they managed to rig the annual Time magazine poll to find the most-influential people in the world. The winner? The founder of 4chan. Which is just a little bit scary.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 10:56 pm under Amusing, Google, Internet, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!