Explicit porn videos disguised with Irish subtitles were live on YouTube for months before being removed
Users had been uploading pornographic content by giving them Irish language titles
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Your support makes all the difference.YouTube has removed a series of explicit videos that were live on the site for months because users managed to disguise the content with the Irish language.
Maitíú Ó Coimín, a journalist with the Irish language site Tuairisc, spotted the issue by searching for the Irish word for film, “scannáin”, on the site, and discovered it turned up a host of “real pornographic films”.
Speaking to the BBC, Ó Coimín explained that his flatmate is a media student in Galway, and that he had been looking up the word “scannáin” on YouTube for a project.
After looking further into the issue, he said he found between 15 and 20 films of “a questionable nature”.
Ó Coimín said that four different accounts found to have been registered on the same day appeared to have uploaded the films, and used Irish to describe their content.
“The accounts all have an Asian woman as a profile picture,” he added. “These were real pornographic films.”
Whoever had created the account did not appear to have been an Irish speaker due to the syntax of the descriptions, and are instead thought to have used a translation tool, the BBC reported.
The Irish Independent reported that YouTube was unaware of the issue before Ó Coimín’s discovery flagged it, but the video hosting service was “quick to take action” as soon as the company was made aware of it.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “YouTube’s Community Guidelines clearly state that sexually explicit content is not allowed on our site.
“We remove videos and channels that violate our policies when flagged for our attention.”
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