Vine, Twitter’s new “long photo” app, showed a lot of promise when it launched this weekend. I liked its potential, particularly in creating a new type of media. And while there has been some scaremongering about its potential for supporting amateur porn, I had dismissed it as nothing.
But today, for a little over ten minutes, the top “editor’s pick” — that is, the video at the top of everyone’s feed, auto-subscribed to on download — was hardcore porn. It’s hard to see Vine surviving this unscathed.
Quite why or how the six second clip — apparently recorded from a monitor — ended up as the editor’s pick is unclear, but it has now been removed.
This picture, from the Guardian‘s Joanna Geary — I can confirm its accuracy, but neglected to save a picture myself before it was taken down — shows what was displayed to users upon opening the app:
Users did need to click to see, but many — myself included — will have assumed that the actual video was likely to be innocuous, since it was, after all, recommended by the service itself.
I am awaiting comment from Vine explaining how and why this happened, but the fact that it happened at all is not good for the company, or for Twitter itself.
Update:
A Twitter spokesperson responds:
“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.”
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