No More Porn on Vine, Says Twitter

CYBERSPACE—No matter what was allowed previously on Twitter-owned video sharing mobile app Vine, a new policy just announced by the parent company states clearly that pornography is no longer welcome. "Vine is a platform for a broad range of expression including spontaneous moments, hilarious jokes, and meaningful events," explained Twitter support. "Pornographic or explicit sexual content is not allowed on Vine." A similar notice was posted to the Vine blog, where the decision to ban porn is laid at the feet of the Vine community. "We introduced Vine to make it easier for people to find, watch, create and share videos right from their mobile phones," it reads. "As we’ve watched the community and your creativity grow and evolve, we’ve found that there’s a very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community. So we’re making an update to our Rules and Terms of Service to prohibit explicit sexual content. "For more than 99 percent of our users," they continue, "this doesn’t really change anything. 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." However, some of the specifics are rather subjective in terms of what is and is not allowed, especially regarding nudity. Per Twitter: What is explicit sexual content? Explicit sexual content includes depictions of sex acts, nudity that is sexually provocative or in a sexual context, and graphic depictions of sexual arousal. Examples of what’s not okay to post: * Sex acts, whether alone or with another person * Use of sex toys for sex acts * Sexually provocative nudity, for example, posts that focus on exposed genitalia or depict nudity in a context or setting that is sexually provocative (like a strip club) * Close-ups of aroused genitals underneath clothing * Art or animation that is sexually graphic (such as hentai) What is okay to post? We allow depictions of nudity or partial nudity that are primarily documentary, educational or artistic in nature. We also allow suggestive posts, just not sexually explicit ones. Examples of what’s okay to post: * Nudity in a documentary context, e.g. videos of nude protestors * Nudity in an artistic context, e.g. nude modeling in an art class * Nudity that is not sexually provocative, e.g. a mother breastfeeding her child * Clothed sexually suggestive dancing Referring to the move as Twitter's "velvet-glove porn crackdown," ZDNet's Violet Blue suggested that the prohibition may have been in the planning stages for a while. In January of last year, she wrote, "Vine was yanked out of the iTunes Featured section for violating Apple's notoriously Victorian (and hypocritical) content guidelines. A clip called 'Dildoplay' had accidentally ended up in the Vine Editor's Picks selection. Apple's App Store policy does not allow nudity. "Vine responded to the 'Dildoplay' snafu and immediately began to hide adult content," she added. "By the end of the day January 28, hashtag searches for terms such as #sex, #porn and #boobs no longer returned results. Twitter pushed further explicit content changes to Vine on February 6, 2013. "A year later," she concluded, "Twitter has taken the final step to begin eliminating adult sexual expression from Vine's creative and diverse panoply. The change makes Vine into a content creation service where a whole spectrum of users now simply don't exist." Yes, but the decision still seems a bit odd considering there's a shitload of porn on Twitter proper, but what do you want from corporate America, which sees no problem soliciting its members to rat out fellow members. "If you see a video that violates our updated policy, you can report it by tapping the button with three dots below the post and selecting 'Report this post'. As always, you can contact us with your thoughts and feedback on this or anything else about Vine." Of that we have no doubt!