On Thursday, news sites including the Washington Post, Vox, Newsweek, the Mirror, and the Huffington Post, displayed graphic hardcore pornography on some old articles.
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. 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. Some redacted snapshots are included below:
An earlier archive of the article from the Washington Post dating from December 2019 gives an insight into what happened. Where the pornography was located in the news article, instead shows a placement sign saying “goodbye for now,” with a cartoon astronaut waving goodbye. This appears to be from the previous video platform used by the Washington Post, Vidme, which was bought in 2017 by Giphy. As pointed out by the post on 4chan, the domain registration seems to have lapsed, and now redirects to the pornographic website. At the time of writing, the only news outlet that has updated its article to remove the embedded pornography is the Washington Post.
This is a breaking story, and may be updated with further information.