YouTube caught hosting graphic bestiality images

  • 25/04/2018

YouTube is under fire again after revelations it has hosted graphic images of bestiality on its site.

The sickening images include photos of women engaging in explicit sex acts with horses and dogs.

They appear to have been made in South Asian countries by content-farming companies who use the thumbnails to promote video content and get video streams.

Some of the videos have got millions of views, BuzzFeed News reports.

It's the latest inappropriate content scandal to rock YouTube. Late last year the video-sharing site was flooded with videos featuring child favourites like Spider-Man, Peppa Pig and Elsa from Disney's Frozen, combined with violent, sexual and disturbing content.

Another investigation revealed advertisers' ads had run in videos with young girls in underwear, doing the splits, and rolling around in bed - which included sexually inappropriate comments posted by viewers.

At the time, YouTube repeatedly vowed to do better - including implementing new screening processes to filter out offensive content from the site and hiring additional staff.

YouTube caught hosting graphic bestiality images
Photo credit: @KritischeKlara / Twitter

But a YouTube employee told BuzzFeed that YouTube's thumbnail monitoring technology doesn't flag bestiality, allowing the explicit content through. And once again the company has promised to take action.

"These images are abhorrent to us and have no place on YouTube," a spokesperson for the company told BuzzFeed News.

"We have strict policies against misleading thumbnails, and violative content flagged to us by BuzzFeed has been removed.

"We're working quickly to do more than ever to tackle abuse on our platform, and that includes developing better tools for detecting inappropriate and misleading metadata and thumbnails so we can take fast action against them."

Newshub.