Vine bans all sexually explicit content on app

7 Mar 2014

Popular video-sharing website Vine has taken steps to ban all sexually explicit content on the app and has changed its rules and terms of service.

The company announced the move on a blog post, after deciding that having this type of content on the service was not ‘a good fit’.

“We introduced Vine to make it easier for people to find, watch, create and share videos right from their mobile phones,” said the statement. “As we’ve watched the community and your creativity grow and evolve, we’ve found that there’s a very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community. So we’re making an update to our Rules and Terms of Service to prohibit explicit sexual content.”

The service only launched in January 2013 but from the offset became popular with celebrities who posted six-second clips of themselves, however, soon after it became popular with those involved in the pornographic industry as a means of gaining notoriety.

The company later clarified that in terms of the overall content of the service, this type of content is in the minority.

“For more than 99pc of our users, this doesn’t really change anything. For the rest: we don’t have a problem with explicit sexual content on the internet – we just prefer not to be the source of it.”

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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