Can This Go Live? #1

Published: 2025 July 3

Disclaimer: The following is an educational analysis based on the author's interpretation of publicly available data using the framework outlined in this post. It constitutes the author's opinion and is not a definitive assertion of fact.

What is "Can This Go Live?"?

A series of blog posts that show examples of online activities that I:

Stumbled upon by interacting with the online community.
Was surprised to see due to at least one potential community guideline violation.

What is this blogpost about?

The first blogpost in the series “Can This Go Live”. To start off the series, the examples will likely skew to examples seen on the major user generated video content (UGVC) platforms.

Interest & Impact

Analysts: Platform trust & safety workflows.
Video Creators: Spam behaviors and patterns.
Users: Identifying and minimizing spam.

What did I stumble upon?

About the video

Platform: YouTube
Title: The Lakers Just Signed A Silent Killer
Creator: GOAT

About my interest in the video: The 2025 summer NBA free agency period started on 2025-06-30 at 18:30 US ET. As part of the media’s coverage, some YouTube channels like GOAT started releasing player movement video reviews. Due to my decision to hit the channel’s subscribe button at one point in time, I saw the channel uploaded this interesting video.

About how I stumbled upon the examples

While watching videos across UGVC platforms, one reason I like reading the comments is to make the viewing experience feel more like a community experience. During my routine scrolling activity, I came across the following comment. The comment was surprising because:

The profile picture was of a person dressed provocatively.
The comment like count seemed unusually high in comparison to the other comments in the video discussion section.

Figure 1: High-engagement spam comment

Figure 2: Suspicious account profile

Analysis: The account profile page is surprising because there is sexually themed text “She is always easy to get wet 👗💖🔥”. Furthermore, there is a link to another account profile page with a profile picture of a person dressed provocatively.

Figure 3: Search results for profile text

Deeper Investigation: I first did a Google Search of the text. Second, I did a Google Search of the profile pictures. The profile picture in point 1 returned no matches, while the profile picture in point 4 returned exact matches.

Figure 5: Malicious off-platform link detection

Verification: I clicked into the account profile page mentioned in point 4. The profile page has an off-platform/outbound link “connectifylink.com/babyfans”. According to both Gemini and ChatGPT model responses, the link is malicious.

Summary of Problematic Activity

The information indicates a group of accounts engaged with video content by adding inauthentic interactions to video discussion comments. The "highlighted comments" draw users to an account profile (A1). From A1, the user encounters eye-catching text and links to other on-platform accounts (A2). Finally, from A2, the user is enticed to click an off-platform link to a potentially malicious digital product/service.

Conclusion: Coordinated inauthentic engagement aimed at driving traffic to malicious off-platform services through multi-stage redirection.

Questions for Analysts

Do these examples violate at least one of the two guidelines (Nudity & Sexual Content or Thumbnails)?
If “yes”, what is the impact to ecosystem participants (consumers, producers, advertisers)?
How prevalent is this issue and what is the frequency of occurrence?
How are potentially problematic keywords/phrases like "Get wet" detected?
How are potentially problematic texts then used to find other accounts (n-grams)?
What keywords/phrases are currently being used that are not detectable by program-driven approaches?
How are commonly referred-to accounts detected (e.g., A1 linking to A2)?