“Hugo, it’s legal! I’m not the arbiter of what is the law in your country!” These are the words of Sarah Bain, the Vice President of Public Engagement at Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), the new owner of Pornhub. Ignore the name of this newly established equity firm for a moment. Bain is on a mission, and there’s only one objective—prove to the world that pornography is normal for society, and Pornhub is on your side.

Hot off the heels of our in-depth report on YouTube Shorts, Safe Surfer has discovered that the comments feature for YouTube videos is being abused by spam accounts to spread pornographic content. Companies, in the marketing of their upcoming movies and television series, frequently post trailers to promote new content—an example of this could be Disney. To grow its customer base, the company posts promotional trailers to YouTube for new Disney+ streaming content from key franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars.

Update 18 August 2023: since this article was originally published in May 2022, we suspect that Google have since made at least some improvements to the content that gets fed through YouTube Shorts to devices with YouTube restrictions applied. This highlights our concern with regard to the technology sector where new technologies and experiences for consumers can be released at the expense of safety. We think that safety should be by design, rather than a later addition.