CYBERSPACE—The clever folk who managed to post some porn videos to YouTube and not have them flagged and removed for months by "hiding" them behind Irish language titles have an Irish journalist named Maitíú Ó Coimín to thank for outing the scheme. The story went seriously viral yesterday after Ó Coimín published his findings in an article posted last week to Tuairisc.ie, the Irish language website he writes for. In all, he identified four separate channels containing a few dozen or so movies, according to the BBC.
The journalist stumbled upon the films quite by accident, explaining, "My flatmate is a media student in Galway who was looking up [the Irish word for film] on YouTube for a project. I looked a bit further into it, and there were about 15 to 20 films of a questionable nature."
He added, "The accounts all have an Asian woman as a profile picture. These were real pornographic films." He pointed out the films, some of which were full-length movies in HD, were uploaded by four different accounts all registered on the same day, October 13, 2014.
Ó Coimín also took note of the probability that whoever uploaded the videos was not a native Irish language speaker, but had likely used a translation tool to come up with the titles for the movies. Still, only someone searching in Irish Gaelic would have either knowingly or unwittingly found the channels.
YouTube swiftly removed the content, and responded to requests for comment with a general statement, "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."
But Ó Coimín also pointed out that YouTube does not proactively spider for potential infractions using all 90 languages translated by Google Translate, leaving open the possibility that the Irish language scheme was one among many.
To the extent that YouTube now endeavors to plug that language hole, people can also thank Maitíú Ó Coimín, who is obviously very protective of his native language.
