At first glance, Riya (name changed to protect her identity) appears to be one of many popular family channels on YouTube. However, a closer look reveals sexual innuendo hidden within his “family blog.” But that’s not the whole truth. In fact, Riya is also a porn star.
An investigation by India Today’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) team found that multiple YouTube channels posted content that fell under YouTube’s “sexual gratification” content category. In these videos, female content creators can be seen doing ordinary jobs. For example, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning the house, feeding children, dancing, teaching, or saying “good morning” to an audience. So far there don’t seem to be any issues. After all, that’s what family bloggers do. They record general household activities.
But after a few minutes, the blogger’s unusually provocative behavior, deliberate mismatches in clothing, and unnecessary exposure of various body parts began to draw attention. In another channel, Kavita (not her real name) was given a fake English class in which she used provocative lines and deliberately exposed body parts. Such videos have been viewed millions of times.
A link to the Telegram channel is strategically placed on the channel’s community page, which leads to a group with more than 650 members. Two different users have since offered to sell “Rhea’s videos” in personal chats. A user calling himself Riya Das demanded Rs 1,000 to enter a private Telegram group containing adult videos of YouTubers. But it’s not just “Riya”. There are many Telegram groups selling pornographic content from popular desi bloggers from remote villages and towns in India. For example, “Riya” claims to be from Assam.
There are many others who create blogs for the public and adult content for paying subscribers. We discovered a separate Telegram group selling high-quality adult videos from more than 40 Indian female YouTubers. Many of them also live stream sex acts at night.
This points to a profound crisis facing the fast-growing content creation space, which has changed the fate of thousands of Indians. Social media influencers’ “rags to riches” stories entice people to make quick money, but not everyone succeeds. Now it seems that many people are forced to take such measures.
Online safety issues
The videos posted on these YouTube channels themselves appear to violate YouTube’s Nudity and Sexual Content Policy, which prohibits content “intended for sexual gratification.” In addition to this, broadcasting links to pornographic websites on these YouTube channels may pose risks to underage users.
Subhash Mahapatra, professor of sociology at Delhi University, said such content is particularly harmful to children, who can easily become addicted to such provocative videos.
YouTube has long been accused of neglecting children’s safety. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based research organization, revealed that YouTube does not differentiate between recommendations sent to teenage users and adult users with similar interests. This puts young users at risk of being fed harmful information, often without them even knowing it.
