Enterprising users managed to find a workaround YouTube's no sexually explicit content policy and put up porn on the site, which was hidden under the guise of films -- albeit not in English.
Four different channels, which were all registered on the same day in October 2014, put up 20 videos that were titled scannán, which means film in Irish.
When a user searched for films -- until the time the content was removed from YouTube -- one would likely chance upon the cleverly hidden porn videos.
While one can espy a gamut of videos on YouTube that range from the bizarre to the emotional, occasionally one may also chance across racy videos that are not explicit. YouTube is known for its stringent policies and swiftness in taking down inappropriate content, which is why it is surprising how the porn videos managed to stay put on the video-sharing service for several months.
The presence of the content on the site was revealed by Maitiú ó Coimín, a journalist with the Irish news publication Tuairisc.ie.
ó Coimín discovered the presence of the content after his flatmate, a media student, accidentally chanced on the same when researching for a university project on the site using the keywords scannán and its plural scannáin. On delving deeper the journalist discovered that nearly 15 to 20 films of questionable nature existed under this guise.
All the four YouTube accounts associated with the videos had the photograph of the same Asian woman for their profile picture. However, the phrasing of the video descriptions suggests that the individual who uploaded the pornographic content on YouTube was not a native Irish speaker and had likely used an online tool for translation.
"It's not actually good Irish; it's just random words translated," ó Coimín told Mashable. "The grammar and syntax is awful; it looks like it has gone through Google Translate."
According to the journalist, the videos on the four different channels seem to originate from Japan, United States, Italy and Russia. ó Coimín is of the opinion that a possibility exists that other languages are also used for the same purpose because YouTube is not equipped to recognize the nearly 90 Google Translate languages.
YouTube has removed the pornographic videos from its site after Tuairisc.ie posted the story.
"YouTube's community guidelines clearly state that sexually explicit content is not allowed on our site," said a YouTube spokesperson. "We remove videos and channels that violate our policies when flagged for our attention.
