"Human error" led Vine to promote porn as Editor's Pick

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 28 Jan 2013 at 16:08

Twitter has apologised after "human error" led to a pornographic clip being chosen as the "Editor's Pick" on its new short video service, Vine.

Vine was bought by Twitter last year. The service lets users embed six-second video clips into Tweets using an iOS app.

The service immediately suggested the possibility of Vine becoming beset with porn, with Twitter being used to share images of adult content - as PC Pro previously revealed, users should be careful clicking the BBC hashtag.

A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor's Picks, and upon realising this mistake we removed the video immediately

Twitter apologised today after a pornographic video - from a feed named "nsfwvine" - was chosen as an "Editor's Pick".

"A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor's Picks, and upon realising this mistake we removed the video immediately," a Twitter spokesperson told PC Pro. "We apologise to our users for the error."

The clip was quickly removed from the top pick list, but a screenshot is available on IT Pro. The Vine clip in question remains online, and the feed is still available on Twitter.

Vine's terms don't ban pornographic content, but the service does stop such clips from playing automatically, showing instead an image reading "warning: this clip may contain sensitive content", and requiring the user to tap to view it.

As the clip in question was clearly tagged as sensitive content, it's unclear how it ended up in the top picks.

App Store concerns

The incident raises the spectre of Vine's app - or even Twitter's - being removed from the App Store.

Apple is quick to remove apps with pornographic content, expelling photography site 500px's app last week over adult content.

Vine's app is so far only available on iOS, with other platforms expected to follow soon.