Seriously, Google? Uncensored porn still appears on YouTube.

It seems like YouTube faces a significant content moderation controversy every few months. Now, users have uncovered uncensored porn pictures on the video streaming platform.

Redditor coreynj discovered that YouTube users could view uncensored porn profile pictures by searching for terms like “XXXX” or “XXXX,XX,XXX,X,XXXXX,XXXXXX,XXXXXXXX,XXXXXXXXXX.” What’s also concerning is that these profile pictures are visible even when you’re signed out of the platform. This suggests that underage users can also view these images.

What’s peculiar about these channels is that they don’t seem to host pornographic content for the most part. However, some of these accounts have playlists of short NSFW videos interspersed with seemingly tame clips, ostensibly in a bid to evade moderation. The NSFW clips often accrue millions of views, while the most popular channels have over 200,000 subscribers. These accounts also tend to link to each other, suggesting bot-related activity.

The Redditor notes that you can also find explicit videos on YouTube with search terms such as “mmd r18” and “see through try on haul”. Furthermore, they claimed that the platform has a “huge” problem with uncensored hentai, while linking to an extensive playlist of NSFW content.

In any event, the uncensored profile pictures are particularly troubling as they’re visible to every YouTube user, including signed-out viewers. We’ve asked Google for comment on this issue and will update our article as soon as the company answers our questions.

This news comes after YouTube started testing a new feature to automatically blur thumbnails for videos related to mature themes. So we’re glad to see the company implementing another layer of protection against NSFW content. Nevertheless, I hope the company comes up with a solution for these explicit profile pictures in particular.