Vidme embeds porn on news websites after domain purchase
A flood of hardcore pornographic content has spread like wildfire on Thursday showing up on news websites after a company called 5 Star Porn HD bought the expired domain for video hosting site Vidme, which went out of business in 2017.
This means that any websites with Vidme embeds now have pornographic content being displayed across their pages including prominent news websites such as The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Huffington Post, and other major sites.
The websites immediately started deleting the pornography from their pages.
The incident occurred sometime on Thursday mid-day, when readers of leading news sites were met with a flurry of porn videos embedded within articles. Archived versions of the effected pages show that there was formerly a Vidme embed on their pages.
While it remains unclear as to the cause of the content showing up, one theory suggests that all embedded Vidme videos and content are displaying 5 Star Porn HD’s landing page, rather than the original videos posted.
Others consider the move as a marketing trick to boost 5 Star Porn HD’s popularity online among similar sites. The company has yet to make a public statement.
Despite this incident, embedded content, when used correctly, can help illustrate a blog post or news item online and provide a layer of credibility. But when incidents like these happen, they become hard to deal with, as thousands of embeds that don’t go where they’re supposed to.
It is worth mentioning that most social media platforms have enabled embeds of their content; Twitter activated embeds in 2012, and Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram all allow some version of embeds as well.