This took… actually a little bit more time than we would have expected, but it looks like users have already started using Twitter’s new Vine app to post sexually explicit material. Vine is a service that lets people post six-second videos to Twitter, and it seems that a lot of people have been using it to post six seconds of porn, once again proving that if you give people a new way to communicate, they will almost immediately use it to send each other pictures of their genitals.
Any content on Vine that gets flagged by users as being explicit is given a warning that needs to be clicked to see the content, but that means before it’s flagged anyone can come across it. Besides the obvious issue of people stumbling on to unwanted porn, it could cause a real problem for Twitter and Vine.
Apple goes to near-comical lengths to keep explicit content off their devices — though they conveniently ignore the fact that Safari can always be used for porn. If Vine doesn’t clean up its act it could be the next 500px — a photo-sharing app deleted from the App Store last week because of users posting explicit content. It would be a huge hit to Vine if it were suddenly excluded from the Apple ecosystem. It would also be a huge blow to people who just want to use the service to put videos of their junk on the Internet.
In a statement, Twitter said that in addition to hiding flagged content behind a warning, any content that violates their guidelines will be removed, and users could have their accounts deleted. That could be to show Apple that Twitter and Vine are serious about keeping objectionable content off their service, but it’s unclear if it will actually keep users from posting pornographic content.
A quick and somewhat regrettable search later, it seems that at the moment, there’s still plenty of explicit content on Vine if you search for hashtags like #porn, but the same can be true of making the same search on Twitter. Although at this point, most of the #porn comments on Twitter are people linking to articles about all the porn on Vine.
(via Business Insider, image via Rosaura Ochoa)
- Vine launched last week
- South Korea wants to block all porn on teenagers’ phones
- The Russian version of iTunes had a porn problem as well
