Spotify showed porn videos in search results for some popular artists

A Reddit user posted a screenshot overnight of a Spotify search that brought a surprise: a pornographic video tucked into suggested results for the rapper M.I.A. Here’s a NSFW link to the thread. The video shown in their screenshot didn’t appear for us, but we found others after scrolling through dozens of results in the “Video” tab.

One of the accounts that posted videos we saw has published erotic audio for years but has sprinkled in sexually graphic videos more recently. Another account, which was named with a long string of alphanumeric characters, has been publishing equally nonsensically-titled explicit videos as a podcast account since mid-November.

Spotify representative Laura Batey told The Verge in an email that the examples we provided “have been removed due to violation of our policies.” Those policies include forbidding sexually explicit material. We asked Spotify for more information on how the videos made it past its moderation and will update here if it responds.

The videos we found appear to be unmoderated podcast uploads, and reporting them isn’t very convenient. The Spotify app lacks a …read more