Vine Bans Sharing Of Pornographic Content

Twitter video-sharing application Vine has announced it is prohibiting the use of explicit sexual content on its service.

In a blog post, the Twitter application, which allows users to upload and share six-second video clips, said that it was updating its rules and terms of service to clamp down on what it says are “a very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community”.

“For more than 99 percent of our users, this doesn’t really change anything,” the blog said. “For the rest: we don’t have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet – we just prefer not to be the source of it.”

Brief encounter

Users who come across any content which falls foul of the new policy, which is effective immediately, can report the video by tapping an icon consisting of three dots below the post and selecting “Report this post”.

Notifications have been sent to users whose accounts were deemed to have sexually explicit content, and Vine has asked them to remove the material to comply with its new rules. The company has also provided a guide to what it deems to be explicit and safe content on its website, just in case of any confusion.

Vine was launched in January as a dedicated iPhone application, but quickly attracted controversy for the amount of adult content that could be found on the service. This included an embarrassing incident where an adult video was included in the ‘Editors’ Pick’ selection of top videos on the site, which Twitter blamed on ‘human error’.

Following these complaints, Twitter announced it would be filtering what searches could be carried out on Vine, although such filters did not apply to the content itself.

Vine currently carries a disclaimer in the AppStore that warns of “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity”.

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