YouTube bug allows users to upload ‘undeletable’ hardcore porn: Report

Here is how the exploit works. A user told Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media that the exploit worked by breaking YouTube’s video tagging system—the field where users can add tags to the video when uploading.

Users used something called a “newline” character, which YouTube rarely counts as an actual character. It is essentially what is written when you press the enter key on your keyboard. Users spammed millions of these characters in the video tags. This prevented the visibility of these videos.

In a Discord channel that shares pornography links, one user shared a text (.txt) file that contains 4 million of these newline characters, claiming that it can be used to upload “undeletable” videos to YouTube.

Maiberg says that YouTube has since fixed the bug but it has not fared so well in deleting the videos that were already uploaded to the platform. While many of the videos have been deleted, the platform is struggling to find all of the videos that were uploaded using this technique.

“We’re 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,” said YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon to Maiberg, admitting to the difficulty.