YouTube battles "Porn Day" campaign

YouTube is the latest target for pranksters looking to amuse themselves.

Today, May 20, has been deemed "Porn Day" by denizens of 4chan and eBaum's World, with an organized group of users from the sites uploading video clips of explicit, adult content en masse in an attempt to overwhelm the search results. In actuality, it appears that content was prematurely uploaded on the afternoon of the 19th. YouTube has already taken some steps to fight back, but it's disturbingly easy to find stuff you really don't want to see, and the uploaders are changing tactics.

As one might expect, the pornographic clips are being uploaded without any indication that they're for adult eyes only, making them easy to happen upon by casual searchers. As the upload-fest has progressed, users are also uploading what seems to be legitimate content, but is in fact a porn video that simply has 20-30 seconds of non-porn content (a newscast, an interview) at the beginning.

YouTube, for its part, has been fast to remove the video clips for violations of the site's terms of use, but we are still able to find porn videos posted a few hours ago. Even those that are found and removed leave porn residue, since the XXX-rated videos are still showing up in searches and their explicit thumbnails remain in plain view for anyone to see.

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

The lag time between video and thumbnail removal seems to be ruffling the feathers of some users, particularly those with kids who use the site. After all, it's pretty easy to run across these thumbnails even though their corresponding videos have been removed, and it's pretty clear what's going on at first glance.

YouTube is getting a little inadvertent help in combating the uploading, thanks to the fact that the earliest posters all used the same tags (for instance, marblecake, jonas brothers [search at your own risk]), which made identifying videos easier. Many uploaders are also posting links to their "victories" on the forums, making it easier to find videos that way as well.