Perhaps it was a foregone conclusion, what with the Internet's proven ability
to turn any new technology
into a platform for showing naked people.
 |
| Does Twitter's Vine have a porn problem? |
But Twitter's new video-sharing app, Vine, is under scrutiny after early
adopters started using it to flash six-second porn clips to the app's users and
to the larger Twitter community.
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It's an issue that has Twitter scrambling to appease concerns. And it's
raising questions about how Apple, the only place where smartphone users can
download the app, will respond after recently banning other apps that provide
access to sexual content.
The issue gained attention Monday when Vine users noticed a video of what was
described as hard-core pornography showcased in the prominent Editor's Picks
section of the mobile app.
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Users took to the comment section of that video to complain. Twitter
apologized Monday, saying it was a mistake.
A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the
videos in Editor's Picks, and upon realizing this mistake we removed the video
immediately," the company said in a statement sent to CNN. "We apologize to our
users for the error."
Released Thursday, Vine
is a Twitter-owned app that lets users create and share videos
lasting up to six seconds. As with photo-sharing app Instagram, Vine users can
follow other people, whose posted videos show up in a feed on their phones or
can be shared on Twitter and Facebook. The app is available only for the iPhone,
iPad and iPod touch.
Vine's Apple-only status raises interesting questions. Just last week,
Apple banned
image-sharing app 500px from its App Store because it could give
users access to sexual content. The 500px app features
artistically rendered nudes among lots of other photos, but so do other apps
with user-generated content, such as Tumblr, which remain available on Apple's
iOS mobile system.
The Vine app is rated 12+ on iTunes for "infrequent/mild sexual content or
nudity," among other reasons, meaning it's deemed appropriate for users 12 or
older. As of Monday, it was the fifth most popular free app in the App
Store.
Apple did not immediately reply to a message seeking comment for this story.
Vine had been listed on Apple's own Editor's Choice list as early as Monday
morning, but appeared to have been removedby Monday afternoon.
Apple observers Monday were noting the strange position the company finds
itself in. Apple has famously kept tight reins on what appears in its App Store
and on its mobile operating system in general. The late CEO Steve Jobs famously
argued that control on the front end delivers a user experience free from porn,
spam and other digital
unpleasantness.
But as the digital Web grows and evolves, it's becoming tougher to parse the
blurry line between apps that promote adult content (and which are turned down
or banned by Apple as a matter of course) and those which simply provide access
to such fare.
What, for example, is the distinction between the banned 500px app and the
app for Tumblr, the blogging platform which, among its millions of blogs,
includes many that host explicit sexual content?
"From the start, Apple has said they'd get the App Store wrong, and come
across things they didn't anticipate, but that they'd learn and grow," said Rene
Richie, editor of Apple-centric blog iMore, in a post Monday. "This particular
problem has been around for years, but as social sharing has become easier, it's
come to the surface again."
Interestingly, it was just a little less than a year ago that Apple banned
Viddy, a video-sharing app that has been compared to Vine, because it gave
access to user-generated adult videos. The Viddy app was eventually returned to
the App Store.
On Twitter's end, the anything-goes aspect of Vine jibes with the site's
overall philosophy. Compared to Facebook, which believes social sharing is best
when tied to a user's true identity and real-world networks, Twitter allows its
users to register under fake names and has fought governments and
law-enforcement agencies seeking user information .
As such, Twitter has taken a more hands-off approach on adult content. It's
not hard to hunt down hashtags its users are employing to share adult content on
a daily basis. (#TwitterAfterDark becomes a trending topic on the site nearly
every day -- clicker beware).
By contrast, searching for several suggestive hashtags (such as #naked or
#porn) on Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app bought by Facebook last year,
render no results. Because Instagram is an Apple-like closed environment,
sexually explicit images are difficult, if not impossible, to find there.
By Monday afternoon, hours after Vine had apologized and deleted the porn
video from its Editors Picks, what uproar there was online was subsiding.
As some observers noted, Vine isn't otherwise experiencing anything new in
the tech world.
"As virtually every new video or photo-sharing service has shown us since the
dawn of the Internet, from Flickr to ChatRoulette, it's very difficult to keep
these sites or apps G-rated. So the companies either learn how to police it
well, like Flickr does, or they wither and die, as ChatRoulette did," wrote The
Atlantic Wire's Adam Clark Estes in a post titled "Vine has a porn problem
because, of course it does."
In a statement to CNN, Twitter noted what had already become apparent on the
app -- that users can report videos they deem inappropriate.
"Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that
a viewer must click through before viewing the video," a spokesperson said in
the statement. Reported videos that are determined to violate Vine guidelines
will be removed from the site and the user account that posted them may be
terminated, according to the statement.
Vine's terms of service ban illegal activity, harassment or abuse and
behavior such as impersonating another user or violating trademark and
copyright.
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