Why is YouTube blocked in Japan?

YouTube had been blocking sexually explicit search terms in Chinese and Japanese, but not those in English. The search terms were blocked even with the restricted mode turned off.

According to Google Trends, the blocking appears to have started since October 2017.

Mothership contacted Google and its PR firm in Singapore on the blocking, but neither responded. Less than four days after Mothership sent its last request for comment, the terms are no longer blocked.

The blocking

During the blocking, looking up search terms related to sex returned no results. The terms include "色情" (sexual), "裸体" (nudity) and"屁股" (buttocks). More explicit terms referring to sexual acts and behaviour were also filtered.

While Chinese terms make up the majority of the blocked terms discovered, Japanese terms like "ラブホテル" (love hotel) and "セフレ" (friend with benefits) were also targeted by YouTube's filtering algorithm.

Searching for those terms in English returned a normal result page with tens of thousands of videos.

But using Google's site-specific search on YouTube returned 183,000 results, even with Safesearch turned on. The title, description and thumbnail of the videos were visible.

The blocked terms were mostly in simplified Chinese. "Adult video" (成人电影) was blocked, typing it in traditional Chinese would return 86,400 results.

The blocking was not specific to certain regions. Searching for the blocked terms through a foreign server showed thatYouTube Netherlandswas also suppressing the sexual terms from returning any results.

Why is YouTube blocking only Chinese and Japanese terms?

YouTube never announced that its search policy has changed, let alone explaining why only Chinese and Japanese terms but not English ones were filtered out.

YouTube's nudity and sexual content policy bans pornography and "content with fetishes". Sexual videos that are not sexually explicit can remain but will only be viewable by adults. The policy does not say anything about search terms.

Many videos returned from the blocked terms were not explicit. Some were videos on sexual health, while others were clickbait videos with the blocked terms included in their title.

When did this start?

When the blocking started is not known, but two Reddit posts describing the block suggest that it started at least before November last year.

A Google Trends analysis shows a sudden decrease in relative interest in several terms in the week starting Oct 15, 2017:

In late 2017, YouTube was embroiled in controversy for providing paedophiliac search results when users search for certain terms in non-English languages like Russian.

YouTube is known for blocking search terms in some regions to comply with local censorship and Internet safety laws, but the censorship on sexual terms was global and language-specific.

Google's response

Mothership contacted Google twice through email: once to Google's press team on July 6 and another to Google's PR firm in Singapore on July 12. Both emails contained a small selection of the blocked search terms.

Neither requests for comment were met with a response.

Four days (July 16) after the email to Google's Singapore PR firm, Mothership has discovered that previously blocked terms now return results normally. The blocked search terms we did not send to Google also have their results reinstated.

When YouTube reinstated the previously blocked search terms is unclear. Google Trends analyses show no visible rises in the interest in those terms.

Top image via YouTube.