Twitter Briefly Features Hardcore Pornography In Its New Video-Sharing App, Vine
The video appeared at the top of many users' feeds, but was quickly removed.
The video appeared with Vine's warning prompting people to tap the image to start playing. It's the same warning users see when a video has been reported for displaying inappropriate content.
It is unclear how a video that was reported for having inappropriate content became featured as an editor's pick. The user name on the video was "nsfwvine" and had the caption, "Dildoplay #nsfw #porn." Those are two common hashtags Vine users tag pornographic videos as to make them easier to find. The video showed a woman using a sex toy on a six-second loop.
This comes a day after Vine was widely criticized for making it easy to find pornographic content uploaded by users. Apple has a record of pulling such apps in the past.
Just last week Apple pulled a photo-sharing app called 500px, saying the app made it easy for users to find nude photos. Apple also pulled Viddy, another video-sharing app that's very similar to Vine, about a year ago because users were posting pornographic content.
As of this writing, Vine is a featured "Editor's Choice" app in Apple's App Store for iPhone.
Twitter released Vine last week. The app lets you cut six-second video clips and share them with your friends. It became very popular very quickly and was praised for its ease of use and clever design.
UPDATE: Twitter has responded to the incident and says the pornographic video was featured as an Editor's Pick due to human error:
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.
Apple declined to comment.