A NEW VIDEO-sharing service recently bought and relaunched by Twitter has found itself attracting attention for the wrong reason today – after accidentally displaying a pornographic video among it’s ‘Editor’s Picks’.
Vine – conceived as a video rival to Instagram, where users can take videos, edit them down into six-second format and upload them to the web – was relaunched last week having been acquired by Twitter last October.
The relaunch brought with it significant promotion and a slew of new users – but almost the entire userbase will have been surprised today to find an adult video clip atop their feeds.
The clip was removed from the list briefly afterwards, but not before thousands of users had seen it – many without any choice, as the app (for iPhone and iPad) is designed to begin playing videos as soon as someone scrolls onto them.
‘Editor’s Pick’ videos are displayed in the feeds seen by every user, and are particularly prominent in the feeds of new sign-ups who have not yet identified friends or other users that they wish to follow.
Twitter has apologised for the appearance of the video:
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 video in question has also been removed from Vine entirely.
Aside from upsetting some users, the error may have broader implications for Vine – which has already been criticised for the ease with which not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content can be accessed by anyone of any age.
The site works on a user-moderated basis – with users able to designate their videos as NSFW themselves, while other users can also flag videos they find as being inappropriate for younger audiences.
It is evident within the app, however, that a significant quantity of unmoderated adult material can be accessed through appropriate hashtags.
Apple has previously pulled similar photo-sharing and video-exchanging apps from its App Store because they made it too easy for younger users to access inappropriate material.
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