Within One Week Of Launching, Vine Has Its First Gaff – Promoting Porn Clips

Well, that didn’t take very long. Twitter’s new short video sharing service, Vine, is already overrun with sexual and pornographic clips. Launched last Thursday, the iOS app allows users to create six-second video clips which are then posted directly to Twitter and the app itself. So here we are on Monday, and already Vine has a porn problem.

In the same way that hashtags are used on Twitter to find tweets on a certain topic, users on Vine are finding videos tagged with NSFW words. Everyone knows that there are thousands of adult sites on the internet, you just don’t search for them if you don’t want to view them – surely the same practice applies to using Vine? Turns out it wasn’t as simple as that…

Vine has an “Editor’s Pick” stream on the home screen of the app, showcasing some of the more popular uploads to the service. However, a clip containing pornographic content managed to find its way onto this stream. Despite the fact that the video was covered by a warning notice, users have reacted angrily to the video appearing in the Editor’s Pick feed, with one user, Taylor Winkelmeyer, writing:

“I clicked on the link because I thought the warning was a joke…. I am furious I had to see something like this. Someone please tell me how to get it off my feed.”

Twitter has apologised for the incident, citing “human error” as the cause of the problem:

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realising this mistake we removed the video immediately… We apologise to our users for the error.”

Porngate aside, how many of you have tried using Vine, and what do you think of it? If you have any (clean) videos you’d like to share, please post a link in the comments section below.