Any media outlet that embedded videos from Vidme back in the day should review their catalog, as the current owners of the domain are displaying pornography in the place where the video embeds once were.
According to VICE, a brand called 5 Star Porn HD bought the one-time YouTube competitor Vidme’s domain.
This means anytime a media outlet like HuffPost, NY Mag, or Washington Post embedded a video clip into an article? The webpage for those pieces now has uncensored pornography ads on them.
For background: Vidme launched in January 2014 and closed down on December 15th, 2017. They were acquired by Giphy at some point.
VICE cites this Twitter user as the one blowing the whistle on the situation.
Twitter hasn’t noticed but a now-defunct video hosting/advertising platform (VidMe) let their domain expire so it was purchased by a porn website, now there is NSFW porn all over the regular internet where their links were embedded lol
— DOXIE ? (@dox_gay) July 22, 2021
For example: https://t.co/UdPRFnq4EP
A list of articles discovered by the outlet to have impacted included a 2015 piece from NY Mag about John Boehner's "creepy kissy face," a 2017 HuffPost article about Martin Shkreli being permanently banned from Twitter, and a 2015 piece from Uproxx about Donald Trump coping with a heckler at a CNN GOP debate.
In the cases of the NY Mag and Huffpost pieces it’s safe to link to those since the porn in question has been removed. But Uproxx chose to redirect the article link to the site’s frontpage instead.
According to my own research, it has been happening since at least May 9th, 2021.
Many websites still haven’t rectified this issue. In a report from National File they list off other victims: Business Insider Australia, Kotaku, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Vox.
They claim that the issue was first discovered by 4chan users.
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