What keeps YouTube free from hardcore porn? Sadly, not a "Galaga-like spaceship that shoots down constellations of flesh-colored pixels" holding YouTube steady from an onslaught of naked ladies and sex scenes. That's the cutesiest explanation fit to print for how the Web's most prolific publisher of webcam bum-shaking videos prevents porn from "dirtying up" the screen. But really, it's a bunch of human beings — YouTube's only around-the-clock support team, or so we hear — who are responsible for deleting explicit or erotic uploads.

Human-powered filtering may still be the most reliable tool for searching out porn. But the guidelines by which porny videos are judged down in YouTube's San Bruno headquarters are unclear. Which is the point, and one I'd even argue, if YouTube weren't playing peek-a-boo with their actual porn prevention practices. If people don't always know what's pornographic, how can an algorithm? Oh, the IMs I used to get from a pal at Yahoo asking my opinion on whether or not a man in a rubber catsuit was too much to let slide! Nobody knows for sure what other people are wanking to anymore. Yet that's what we're led to believe, like when YouTube touts its in-house pattern-matching porn-searching software.

YouTube's been owned by Google for a while now. And if anyone knows what's turning their users on, it's search engines. Are they running text queries, as well, to establish a lusty link between how many times one hunts down boot-fetish videos with how many requests they bang the YouTube database with for Style.com runway clips showcasing fall footwear collections? And are they then blocking that user from uploading some over-the-top shoe-shining clip?

The only way to keep people who don't want to see porn from seeing it is to pay other people to watch it for them. If anyone has some YouTube-produced "How to Spot Smut" training documentation around, we'd love to spend a nice night in going over it with you.

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