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YouTube's Search Autofill Surfaced Disturbing Child Sex Results (buzzfeed.com) 155

Several users are reporting that they found YouTube autocompleting search queries starting with 'how to have' with disturbing suggestions, including 's*x with your kids' over the weekend. From a report: A YouTube spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the matter is still under investigation. "Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it," the company said. "We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion." We tried the same query on YouTube less than an hour before publication of this story, and we found "how to have s*x in school," and "how to have s*x with kids" were still surfacing in the results.
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YouTube's Search Autofill Surfaced Disturbing Child Sex Results

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Spidrman and Elsa doing creepy stuff

  • by Anonymous Coward

    People want what they want. Kids like sex too.

  • by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @09:08AM (#55629129)

    Try to search Youtube for "Kunt and the Gang Sexy Kids" and you won't find his duet with Jimmy Saville's ghost.

    • by Joviex ( 976416 )

      Try to search Youtube for "Kunt and the Gang Sexy Kids" and you won't find his duet with Jimmy Saville's ghost.

      Except... that is all I found.

  • by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @09:11AM (#55629159)

    My impression was that your previous searches would influence your autocompletes. I don't get the same results, mine are quite innocuous.

    That being the case, I have to wonder about the people reporting this.

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @09:16AM (#55629187)

      Exactly. With "how to have" my first auto-complete result is "a life"...

      Umm...

      Never mind.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I just tried it on a clean system that have never searched YouTube in its existence, and got the exact same results as shown in the linked image. If you aren't getting them, it's because you have enough history of searching YouTube (I pity you) overriding it.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Or are we really having a large group of pedos entering obvious search terms into youtube where sexual material (or even nipples) is usually erased within minutes?

    Someone gamed the Youtube search engine to generate a story. Nothing to see here, move along.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @09:13AM (#55629173)

    Turn off the "personalized search results" you pervert!

  • by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @09:14AM (#55629175)

    Well, at least it's s*x and not sex.

    • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Well, at least it's s*x and not sex.

      Yeah but it could be anyone of these things as well

      x
      sx
      ssx
      sssx
      ssssx

      etc

      It's that old sawhorse of "now you have two problems"

    • Autocomplete doesn't put all the words, so maybe it was "How to have sex with kids".
      • Of course slashdot removed the < and > the post was:

        Autocomplete doesn't put all the words, so maybe it was "How to have sex with <your partner to make> kids".
  • Well, I'm sure now it's going to be a top search query, since thousands of people will read the article and go try it out to see if anything comes up.
  • Whats next, someone complaining that youtube's arrow looks like the head of a penis?
  • Is there a reason that the autocomplete should ever ever ever ever autocomplete "sex" at all? How complicated is this?

    You wouldn't finish your wife's sentences in public that way either. This isn't advanced AI. If you want to search for "sex", you get to type "sex" yourself.

    Very complicated.

    • what are you a prude? a castrino? a monk who beats himself whenever he "has an impure thought"?

      plenty of sentences a normal human might say might end in "sex". Whether the topic is medical, gender, joke or porn......

      • "plenty"? sure. "most likely"? no. Doesn't need to be auto-guessed. If you're guessing, you're wrong.

        • yes it should be in the range of things that are auto-guessed, matters involving the word "sex" are a *popular* topic among normal humans. Sexual preference, sexual identity, sexual health, sexual celebrity gossip, sexual media, etc. etc. etc.

          The world between your ears may be different, but most of us don't live in that.

          • a "popular" topic in some locations, not in others. I'd argue not in most. NSFW. I'd argue that most of your day is incompatible with each of those searches that you mention.

            Why are you so against typing your search in the first place? Why do you need suggestions at all? One day you'll be old enough to spell "sex" without help. And maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to type too fast for suggestions to show up in-time anyway.

            • My employer is in the business where demographics and analysis of them are extremely important. Three different meansings uses of the word "sex" are relevant.

              You are a prude, not functioning in the mainstream of human interaction.

              • You might want to define "mainstream of human interaction". I think you'll find that 90% of the time that you spend interactive with humans, the word "sex" is either inappropriate or not tolerated. Think of every minute that you spend at work. Think of most family get-togethers. Think of interviews, shopping, and every contractor you've hired. Any time you're speaking with someone with whom you're exchanging money, you likely avoid any suggestion of "sex".

                Think about the number of people that you speak

                • topic of sex does come up at family get togethers strangely enough, a couple of bad guys are treating their wives badly and cheating ( you know, having SEX outside his marriage), one even made another woman pregnant.

                  more news for you, when married people are visiting their old friends they do joke about sex sometimes. put on your shocked face.

                  At work people gossip about celebrities and politiciians doing sexual things

                  Oh look, the real world isn't like your little safe space between your ears, it's full of

                  • sorry your family get-togethers never include young children. mine tend to. Sorry your old friends don't have children either. Maybe you should all get together to get a bulk-discount on some fertility treatments?

                    Also sorry you have no client-facing duties at work. I do, and there's no celebrity gossip when you're asking for someone's money professionally. I rarely do locker-room meetings.

                    Perhaps you aren't able to read. Life has sex all over the place. But there are plenty of places where it is most

                    • what can I say, we're old...I'm in mid 50s. I and wife have children, they're grown and yes sometimes talk of sexual things.

                      nope, not having place where topic of sex doesn't sometimes come up. happens at work, at home, even heard on the train. And of course we're having topic of sex in this thread, you've written it. Sex sex sex, it's everywhere.

  • I tried it, it still appears as an autocomplete suggestions, but none of the videos showed have anything to do with kids. I wonder how it ended up there.
  • get a good criminal defense lawyer

  • It's more funny than it is offensive. The autocomplete combines partial phrases with nouns and verbs. Both sex and children are "popular" individual search terms. It is a false implication that the whole sentence is popular.

    The computer doesn't know that to combine them in certain sentences is inappropriate. It's very simple programming and programming around these rare combinations is going to slow down webpages and the internet when you consider how many languages there are along with slang and double ent

    • It is probably a distillation of similar searches and something completely innocent, like "how can I have s*x with children in the house."

  • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @11:24AM (#55630125)

    Maybe it is just a weird way of phasing "how to have sex when you have kids", as in "how to avoid having little monsters interrupt intimate moments". And "how to have sex in school" is probably a question that is in the mind of every teenager...

    "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" is even truer with computers.

  • Sex (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @11:31AM (#55630197)
    Say it with me now. SEX! It's a thing, it exists, it's not a dirty word. Ok tutorials on youtube probably ain't great but why can't/won't TFA say the word sex. It's like they're talking about such forbidden fruit it's no wonder the kids end up so messed up, pretend it doesn't exist til they're 18 and then expect them to know all about it.
  • I tried asking "How to use YouTube Autofill" ...

    Sigh. Missed out on another fad.

  • Results: No matches.

  • Seems like the author is conflating auto-complete suggestions with search results.
  • People inside and outside of Youtube as a company have stated that they have very clear evidence that Youtube staff does no care or purposely ignores laws and child safety and illegal content etc because they put image and marketing and PR and growth above all else. THAT is what caused this. A huge multi-channel owner named Matthias is currently destroying them on social media over this issue and they're still doing nothing to fix it while lying and saying that they are. I'm surprised they aren't forwarding
  • Several users are reporting that they found YouTube autocompleting search queries starting with 'how to have' with disturbing suggestions, including 's*x with your kids' over the weekend. From a report:

    A YouTube spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the matter is still under investigation. "Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it," the company said. "We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion."

    We tried the same query on YouTube less than an hour before publication of this story, and we found "how to have s*x in school," and "how to have s*x with kids" were still surfacing in the results.

    Not for me it does. If I type "how to have" I get innocuous suggestions

    https://i.imgur.com/lkatvJV.pn... [imgur.com]

    Interesting if you type "how to have sex" you get suggestions

    https://i.imgur.com/5DryMlR.pn... [imgur.com]

    but as soon as you hit space and get to "how to have sex " it stops

    https://i.imgur.com/nYqdcVU.pn... [imgur.com]

    There are three options here. It runs off what you've searched for before, and the Buzzfeed guy had done a search for "sex with kids".

    Or Youtube have fixed it so that as soon as you get to "how to have sex " it sto

  • Seriously, what's the problem? Something stupid came up in autocomplete results, big f'ing deal. Some uptight idiot got wound up over some trivial nonsense so now it's news and Google is embarrassed?

    I remember the good old days when an idiot with a bug up their ass about something stupid would just be ignored. The worst part of the internet is that idiots amplify each other's nonsense and get taken seriously.

  • Ever notice on Bing image search it throws in some odd stuff, like sometimes regular porn, nudist or family photos get mixed together and in that case some nude images of children or families are mixed in with porn. Personally I find that really disturbing because it exposes those images in a sexual context when the images were not intended as sexual. It creates a potential safe space for pedophile type behavior. I also get nude images of dead bodies sometimes mixed with porn images which is disturbing, but

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