YouTube is one of the social media platforms that best delivers accessible content to its users. From personal blogs to popular songs, YouTube has it all. Music videos for trending songs of the time tend to generate a lot of buzz and views for the site.
One of the most popular songs of the past year was Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. On Tuesday, hackers were able to log into Vevo’s YouTube account and managed to delete the original Despacito music video. Along with this, they also changed the titles of a decent amount of other popular music videos that included many popular artists such as Drake, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Shakira, Chris Brown, DJ Snake, and more.
They replaced the Despacito music video with a video of masked men in hoodies from Netflix’s La Casa de Patel, holding guns to the screen. Along with this, the messages that they added to popular song titles included things like “Free Palestine”, which was added to a music video for one of Shakira’s songs. Later that Tuesday morning, the videos were restored and a spokesperson for YouTube stated, “After seeing unusual upload activity on a handful of Vevo channels, we worked quickly with our partner to disable access while they investigate the issue.”.
No one really knows whether or not the hackers gained access to the artists’ personal Vevo accounts from the larger Vevo account, but apparently the hackers did this as a little joke “just for fun”, with no additional motivation. However, with some of the caption changes, it is clear that there was some political motivation involved.