Cormac Moylan

I got a few messages from a couple of confused subscribers to my blog. They each spotted a post called ‘test video’ which appeared within their readers but disappeared from my blog just as quickly as it was published. As you can guess by the title of the post, I was testing out some video functionality with Youtube’s embed video feature.

I wanted to find out what happens when an attempt is made to embed video which has been flagged as being over 18s on Youtube.

Youtube requires you to login to view videos which may be obscene:

This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community. To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up.

Since anybody can copy the embed code for a video and place it on their site, I wanted to see if the age filter or some other deterrent kicked in order to protect the innocent who didn’t want to see any inappropriate content.

I did a search for Porn on Youtube since I knew this would throw up over 18 content in an instant. I then added the first video which appeared to my blog in order to pollute the minds of my readers test out what would happen next.

After adding the necessary code, the video thumbnail for the porno clip appeared within my blog post. However, it didn’t play; much to the disappointment of Chris who was very quick to point out that the video wasn’t playing within his RSS reader. Instead the below image appeared:

I didn’t expect the video to play once it had being embedded but I did expect something more than the static display of the dodgy video thumbnail. How difficult would it be for Youtube to place a safety message stating something like ‘This video contains content which some users may find offensive and thus the video has been disabled from playing” ? Or, even better than displaying a message, automatically disable the ability to embed video which has been flagged as offensive.

Youtube have the sense to disable the playback of inappropriate content via embedding video but they don’t have the sense to disable the display of the thumbnails of the said videos. Erm, but of an own goal there me thinks.

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