Right… well then. Hardcore porn videos suddenly popped up on ‘professional’ news sites, including Australia’s own Herald Sun.
Other news sites embroiled in the NSFW porn advertisements include The Washington Post (WaPo), and Newsweek, who were recently flooded with lots of piccies of various holes – and a lot of cum. To put it bluntly.
Vice’s Motherboard reported that a porn website, 5 Star HD Porn, bought the ‘Vid.me’ domain name.
A domain name that had, up until recently, been used by a YouTube competitor up until 2017.
So, the new owners apparently decided to fuck with the internet (kinda literally) by changing the historic embeds for a bunch of videos. Whoops.
The results? Well, you guessed it. Normal videos embedded into news articles have been replaced with bareback, high definition, hardcore porn.
what are the chances that all these news sites getting their embedded videos replaced with porn isn’t going to get reported on because it makes them all look bad?
— Baaulp (@Baaulp) July 22, 2021
Other affected websites included Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, New York magazine… and even Teen Vogue. Oh dear.
Meanwhile, British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, and other online-only publications including, BuzzFeed, The Verge, Polygon, and Vox, were also plunged into a PR nightmare.
Seriously though, while most of these websites have picked up on the issue and have swiftly removed the content from their otherwise pure articles, it’s important to note that this is… bad.
The youth-oriented nature of sites such as Buzzfeed and Teen Vogue has meant that a lot of underage people have been exposed to some serious shit – let alone the overarching issue of consent.
Many point to this porn-pocalypse as a severe example of ‘link rot’ – a digital term used to describe the failure to ‘clean’ and maintain ageing hyperlinks.
NO TWITTER I JUST WANT TO RETWEET ARTICLES ABOUT PORN ON MAJOR NEWS SITES IN PEACE LEAVE ME ALONE pic.twitter.com/Rc4sCF04Bt
— Shabab Hossain (@ShababHossain13) July 22, 2021
When online content or images are deleted or broken, the links don’t go back to their original content.
Another example of widespread ‘link rot’ happened after President Trump was banned from Twitter in January for inciting the infamous Capitol riots.
Thousands of tweets that Trump sent out during his years on Twitter were completely wiped out, while any embeds of the tweets now display grey boxes.
Many have argued that the President’s tweets need to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, an act that predates Twitter by more than four decades.
While an independent developer has archived an archive of (most) of Trump’s tweets, this example of link rot indicates that we also risk losing historically valuable, digital information.
Seriousness aside, this is kinda funny. Someone trying to educate themselves on the current geopolitical climate might instead be greeted with something, well, completely different.
It’s hilarious seeing every website trying to ban porn and then porn showing up in news sites.
— 2% Lactose-free Charredasperity (@TheOmegaVirus) July 22, 2021
Honestly, I didn’t see this one coming — props to the Internet for throwing yet another curveball.
