How Should Apple React To Porn On Twitter’s Vine App?

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Vine porn

You’ve probably seen quite a few headlines today about Twitter’s new Vine iPhone app displaying pornography. Vine went live in the App Store last week, and the video sharing service has garnered quite a bit of attention due to its parent company, Twitter.

Vine was made an Editors’ Choice by Apple in the App Store, but the app has been de-promoted following all the porn hubbub. Apple has yet to give an official comment on the issue or pull Vine from the App Store completely.

What does all this mean for Vine, and more importantly, the App Store’s policies on porn?

For those of you who haven’t been following Vine’s porn issue, here’s the quick version: People started noticing porn in Vine over the weekend, and it got to such a point that a pornographic clip was briefly made an editor’s pick by Twitter in the app. Twitter chalked this up to “human error” and started sticking warning messages over potentially offensive videos in Vine. Users were also asked to flag porn as inappropriate. Twitter has started more recently blocking sexual hashtags to try and keep people from finding porn, but that doesn’t mean the porn still isn’t there.

Now this is significant not because of Vine, but because of Apple’s past behavior towards porn in App Store apps.

You may recall the recent pulling of 500px’s popular iOS app due to ambiguous pornography complaints. The same thing happened to Viddy, an app that’s similar to Vine, around this time last year. Neither 500px, Viddy, or Vine encourage the sharing of pornography, but people were sharing naughty stuff regardless. The nature of 6-second videos in Vine encourages the behavior, frankly.

Apple has stepped in on multiple occasions when this porn issue has come up, but the company has yet to do anything about Vine. The app was pulled from the App Store’s Editors’ Choice category earlier today, but that’s nowhere near as harsh as pulling the app altogether. Twitter’s close relationship with Apple probably complicates things.

“Apple has a lot of App Store cleaning to do.”

If an app is capable of showing you porn, and Apple is consistent with its behavior, then apps like Flickr and Tumblr shouldn’t be allowed in the App Store right now. Heck, Instagram shouldn’t available either. But there they are, and you can get porn on them just as easy.

Certain apps, like browsers, show you a ‘this app can display mature content’ warning when you first download them. Why not do this for all social networking apps like Vine too? Otherwise, Apple has a lot of App Store cleaning to do.

Source: Business Insider

Image: ABC News

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