News sites including the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Vox and Newsweek are now filled with hardcore porn after an old video player was seemingly purchased by an adult company.
The explicit videos are playing on the news sites in an embed from a company called "5 Star HD Porn."
The National File, the outlet that broke the story, reports that "articles dating from 2015 to 2017 on a number of news websites that include embedded videos, including some with young audiences, are now displaying the pornography, all from a site called '5 Star HD Porn.' The discovery was first spotted by anonymous posters on 4chan, with a thread posted on the website’s /pol/ board detailing a number of articles that had been afflicted. The pornographic titles include such names as 'Abigal and Eva are hungry for c*ck,' and 'Megan gets stretched out.'""The articles ranged from 'serious' mainstream news articles, such as a Washington Post story from January 2017 about Paul Ryan stopping somebody from dabbing in a photo, a Huffington Post article from May 2017 about Martin Shkreli being permanently banned from Twitter, and an article from the Australian’s Herald Sun from June 2016 about the age of an Australian NBA player," the report continues. "Other affected sites including Vox, the Mirror, Rolling Stone, Business Insider Australia, Newsweek, Kotaku, Vanity Fair, and most disturbingly, Teen Vogue. Readers should be aware that these links contain the unredacted pornography."
It appears that a video player called Vidme was previously used by numerous news sites to embed videos into their stories, but the company ceased to exist in 2017. The company announced on Reddit that they would be shutting down on December 15 and would no longer accept new uploads or members. They stated that this was due to not being able to find a sustainable business model due to increasing competition.
After the shut down, all embedded videos displayed a simple broken link — until now.
When the domain registration lapsed, a porn company apparently swooped in and bought it, turning dozens of websites into involuntary porn hosts.
Of the articles mentioned above, only Washington Post had removed the porn by the time of this publication.
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