Friday 7 March 2014

Twitter's Vine bans porn with New Terms of Service


By on Friday, March 07, 2014

So, Years of campaigning and complaints have finally worked. The California based firm Twitter which bought the micro-video messaging service Vine in 2012 has revised the terms of service with the aim of banning "pornographic or explicit sexual content. Vine users are no longer allowed to post sexually-explicit content on the popular six-second video sharing service.
Explicit content banned on Vine

Company announced the new policy on the vine blog via  a post titled 'A change to Vine content rules'. In tne post, the company said that there is a very small percentage of videos that are not a "good fit" for the community, prompting the change in policy. Twitter said the changes will not affect 99 percent of Vine users, adding, "we don't have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet - we just prefer not to be the source of it."

Vine was launched by Twitter in January 2013, with an iOS app. In June 2013, it introduced the Vine app for Android, and finally brought the service to the Web in January 2014.Within days of the app's official launch in January 2013, sexually explicit and pornographic clips began to appear and Twitter has been heavily criticized for not enforcing this ban sooner.


 The original minimum age for Vine was set at 12-years-old, but this was raised to 17 shortly after the app was launched, in part because of the high level of explicit content on the site. Twitter also had to apologize weeks after the official launch when an explicit clip was made an Editor's Pick. The site claimed the video appeared at the top of the homepage due to a 'human error' but had refused to take down such pornographic videos because it didn't want to censor its users

With this move, Twitter distances Vine from the notorious 'sexting' reputation other photo and video messaging apps such as Snapchat, Kik, and Between have built for themselves.

Twitter has put up a 'Vine explicit sexual content FAQ' page on its Help Center, that includes a list of what's acceptable (artistic or documentary depictions of nudity, Breast feeding) and what's not okay to post (nudity that is sexually provocative or in sexual context).Twitter has put up a 'Vine explicit sexual content FAQ' page on its Help Centre, that includes a list of what's acceptable (artistic or documentary depictions of nudity, Breast feeding) and what's not okay to post (nudity that is sexually provocative or in sexual context).Vine defines explicit sexual content as any content that 'includes depictions of sex acts, nudity that is sexually provocative or in a sexual context, and graphic depictions of sexual arousal.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think the ban is justified? Leave a comment to let us know.

Read More:

  1. Vine Blog
  2. Twitter Help Centre


About Shaunak

A tech lover who loves writing and sharing with people.

0 comments:

Post a Comment