Major news sites now include embedded porn, thanks to VidMe buyout

A slew of news websites, including the likes of New York magazine, The Washington Post, and HuffPost, have found their articles flooded with very real pornography. As in, you might be reading a piece about the bipartisan push for passing some bill and end up watching two fully nude people having sex between paragraphs.

Twitter user @dox_gay brought the somewhat hilarious embedding snafu to the internet’s attention yesterday. They linked the problem back to a video-hosting platform called VidMe that was, in the past, utilized for advertising purposes — hence all the embeds in various high-profile sites. VidMe was recently purchased by a company called “5 Star Porn HD.” The name of that one tells you just about everything you need to know.

As Vice further explains, Vidme briefly tried to be a legitimate YouTube competitor, but the company shut down for good back in 2017. Now that 5 Star Porn HD has purchased the vid.me domain, every single video once hosted on the site redirects to porn.

Hilarity of The Washington Post suddenly hosting straight-up pornography on its website aside, the VidMe situation serves as a poignant reminder of just how fragile the internet really is.

Somewhat fixed, maybe? — In some cases, it seems porngate’s far-reaching effects have already been handled by the news outlets in question.

As of this morning, this HuffPost piece about Martin Shkreli being banned from Twitter — cited by multiple sources as an example of the phenomenon — no longer seems to have any porn on it at all. The same goes for other webpages in dox_gay’s original Twitter thread.

The internet loves and hates porn — As Gizmodo reporter Shoshana Wodinsky points out, the VidMe scandal has had effects far beyond simply forcing random news-readers to view hardcore porn. Google’s Ads program won’t serve advertisements on pages that host pornography — which means any articles now embedded with smut lose out on that good good Google revenue.

Porn is still one of the most polarizing aspects of the internet. In almost all cases it’s sex workers who end up with the short end of this balancing act. The VidMe issue is the rare instance where it’s mainstream media that’s ended up on the wrong side of the equation.

Given the exponential growth of the internet — and how very tenuous its connections are — we’d expect this kind of unintended spillover to become more common in the future.