Johannesburg: Despite being against the music streaming service’s terms, people continue to upload sexually explicit images to Spotify, finding creative ways to fly under the radar.
As of Monday, these kinds of uploads could be found by entering various punctuation marks into the search bar. Usually, these tracks would have names consisting of periods or commas, with pornographic images as the album art.
Some were short, low-effort uploads such as one which featured a photoshopped image of a celebrity with another man and an audio track of a computer-generated voice reading smut.
Others were episodes of obscure podcasts using equally explicit images, such as women exposing themselves or engaging in sexual acts.
To be clear, sexually explicit audio is allowed on Spotify.
There’s a somewhat thriving community of content creators making various kinds of sexual content. Many of these involve podcasts of people reading fanfiction and other smut.
There are also tracks under titles such as “ASMR sex” which sound like an audio track ripped straight off a pornographic film. Or tracks in the vein of “audio porn”, where a person narrates a simulated sexual encounter.
But the uploads using prohibited sexually explicit images are often not particularly well made amateur content, and many are from podcasts that have been long abandoned.
There doesn’t seem to be any good reason for the uploads. Spotify is notorious for its underwhelming artist pay, and this kind of content which is against the terms of use will necessarily have low viewership to escape notice. Baiting a few clicks isn’t going to have much reward.
Perhaps it is an attempt to increase visibility – using the platform to link people to other sites such as OnlyFans or Niteflirt. But having to title your episodes cryptically with full stops and other punctuation is hardly good for discoverability.
Spotify has made an effort to rectify this, and many of the uploads have been taken down. However, it’s likely that the users will just move to some other method of getting under the radar – such is the content moderation arms race across the web.
Spotify has had a difficult time with content moderation in general, it’s practically impossible to work through the vast hours of audio content manually, and automated AI speech recognition technology is not up to the task just yet.
Just last month, Spotify announced its 18-member Spotify Safety Advisory Council aimed at combating misinformation, hateful content and other issues surrounding online speech.
IOL Tech