Over the weekend many people reported that typing "how to have"
would be completed with several variations on pornography with your kids".
Other searches produced responses that also used the asterisked "sex"
word.
Some speculated that an attempt to troll YouTube results was responsible
for making the phrases appear.
"Earlier today our teams were alerted to this profoundly disturbing auto
complete result and we worked to quickly remove it as soon as we were made
aware," said a YouTube spokeswoman.
"We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the
appearance of this auto completion," she added.
YouTube has not yet given an explanation of why the phrase "how to
have s*x with your kids" was suddenly being so widely suggested.
Tony Stower, a policy and public affairs manager from the NSPCC, said
YouTube should have done better.
"Social networks used by millions of children should never suggest
dangerous or illegal content," he said. "It is not good enough for
problems like this to go unaddressed until media coverage brings it to the
attention of sites like YouTube."
Mr Stower said an amendment to a forthcoming UK bill covering data
protection could mean all social networks have to put in place systems that try
to keep people safe.
He said the NSPCC was urging politicians to back the bill when it comes
up for a vote.
Charlie Warzel, writing on Buzz feed, suggested that the use of the
asterisk replacing the "e" in the word "sex" across lots of
different searches suggested deliberate action was behind it.
"The results are very specific and could be the result of a co-ordinate
campaign to game the algorithm," he said.
This could have been an attempt to populate YouTube with search results
that embarrass the site, he said.
None of the videos that the "how to have" results linked to
showed abuse of children.
The disturbing results came after a week in which YouTube was widely criticized
for not doing enough to stop sexual predators targeting young users of the
site.
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