LOS ANGELES — Ads for adult website 5 Star HD Porn reportedly started to appear on recent stories published online by several mainstream news outlets, replacing video content by a defunct mainstream tube site called Vidme.
First reported by Vice yesterday, after being flagged by Twitter user dox_gay, the explicit ads featuring “hardcore porn” were “embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, the Washington Post and a host of other websites,” following the purchase by 5 Star Porn HD of “the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017.”
“Seemingly any Vid.me embeds now redirect to the 5 Star HD Porn homepage,” Vice continued. “The site Vid.me also redirects there.”
By yesterday afternoon, CNET reported that the Washington Post and Huffington Post had started cleaning up this instance of “link rot or content drift.”
"We are in the process of permanently removing this content whenever it appears," a spokesperson for the Huffington Post told CNET.
According to Gizmodo, "It’s not 100% clear what caused the videos to become embedded in the sites. One theory is that all embedded Vidme videos displayed the homepage of 5 Star HD, rather than the original videos. This, in turn, resulted in totally not-porn websites suddenly displaying people having sex."
Gizmodo also theorized the misplaced ads "could also just be a marketing stunt" by 5 Star HD Porn.