YouTube comments bombarded with porn and scam links targeting channels with millions of young fans
Back to Topic
Click to Print
Useful Websites
Glossary Term Selection
Spam commenters are flooding popular YouTube channels with links containing suspected scams and directing young audiences towards pornographic websites.
An i investigation found comments sections on channels such as that of MrBeast – a YouTuber famous for viral stunts with more than 94 million subscribers – were bombarded with spam comments despite YouTube claiming to have addressed the problem in 2019.
Using an open-source spam detection algorithm, our investigation found that on a number of popular channels with millions of subscribers, spam comments made up around one in five comments.
i was able to find at least 20 different comments encouraging users to visit X-rated websites on a recent video on the YouTube channel of best-selling video game Fortnite.
A number of different accounts and messages were shared in the comments thread but most appeared to be directing gamers to the same explicit sites through X-rated accounts.
A mixture of posts is likely to have been used in a bid ...
Want to see the rest of this article?
Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?
- Useful related articles
- Video and multimedia references
- Statistical information and reference material
- Glossary of terms
- Key Facts and figures
- Related assignments
- Resource material and websites
