MNN - Mother Nature Network

Social media addicts usually flock to new offerings fairly quickly and this was the case with Vine, a new app from Twitter. Vine allows users to upload short six-second video clips, and while the typical user may post funny videos of friends, cute puppies or kids playing in the snow, another set of users is utilizing the app to upload pornography.  

 

I heard of Vine a few days ago. but I’m not a social media early adopter — I don’t even use Instagram — but it was a post I saw on my Facebook wall last night that really caught my attention. “Stay far away from the new Vine App.”

 

Evidently a mom uploaded a few videos of her children and then, with her 4-year-old daughter watching, decided to see what other users had uploaded. She clicked on the first video and was presented with an Editor’s Pick and a warning screen, “Warning: This post may contain sensitive content. Tap to view.” Her daughter quickly tapped and was greeted with a pornographic clip.  

 

I understand that pornography is easily accessible on the Internet, but this is taking easy to an entirely new level. No extra warnings, no age verification, simply tap to watch. It doesn’t even say what kind of sensitive content the video may contain. A better warning would be that the video contains sexual content.  Sensitive may mean one thing to one user and something entirely different to another. It is hard to misinterpret the word sexual in a warning.

 

Twitter apologized for the mishap during a Mashable interview, “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. We apologize to our users for the error."

 

The word about Vine’s potential porn problem is getting around — quickly. Although Twitter apologized on Monday and has made changes to limit pornographic video searches, I’m still seeing alarm from parents and others who are less concerned about the pornographic clip being labeled as an editor’s pick and more concerned that the pornography was so readily available.  

 

Historically, Apple has denied app store access to applications that included sexual content. However, Apple’s relationship with Twitter may push this app into a gray area.