Plucking porn off the Vine

Is this the end of dirty little videos on the Internet?

January 29, 2013

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Six seconds of sex is proving too much for Apple and too much for Vine, Twitter’s freshly launched "micro-video" app.

News spread last weekend that dirty clips were really, really easy to find by using hashtags like #porn or #nsfw to search through Vine’s nascent but growing database of twitchy user-made graphics. Then Vine exacerbated their problem by accidentally featuring one such video (tagged "Dildoplay," fyi) as an "Editor’s Pick," which elevated it to the top of many user’s feeds. This "human error" was soon corrected by Twitter/Vine and all known filthy hashtags banned, but the damage was done. Apple removed Vine from its "Featured" section of iTunes’ App store.

So I guess that’s the end of dirty little videos on the Internet.

Or perhaps Vine’s pioneering pornographers are already developing a more obscure coding system which to label their offerings. All Vine can really do here is make dirty content a bit more obscure, so that the only people who find it are those who are looking for it.

While porn-on-demand is hardly a new Internet phenomenon, I do wonder what effect (if any) the nascent Vine format might have on filth itself. Are we entering the age of the micro celebrity sex-tape? How will porn films get their plot lines across in just six seconds? Will masturbation become a frenetic, 1,000 channel universe of degradation delivered in spastic bite-sized loops?

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