Twitter Vine has Porn Videos: Will Apple Ban the App, like with 500px?

It's only been a few days, but Vine, the new 6 second video sharing service that was acquired by Twitter and launched this week, has already been used to post porn videos. I feel so naïve for believing a couple days ago that Vine would be mostly used for cats.

The fact of Vine's porn problem began getting media attention this weekend, when Nick Bilton, of The New York Times, tweeted that a Twitter search for #porn and #sex brought up some Vine videos. Even before that, one day after Twitter Vine launched, the Daily Dot discovered a Twitter account that was already pioneering some Vine porn.

First, some perspective: Vine is not exactly flooding Twitter with pornographic videos. I followed the link from Mashable's story to Vine Peek, a service which immediately live-streams Vine videos as they are posted to Twitter. After watching about 10 minutes of Vine posts in real-time (dozens and dozens of Vine videos) The most objectionable thing I saw was a guy flicking his sleeping dog's nose. (Here's a link to Vine Peek, which is equal parts boring and fascinating. Warning! There is at least some chance of explicit content.)

However small the problem is right now, it can always get worse. And that's a problem for Vine. The Twitter-enabled service is only available for iOS right now, and Apple banned another app last week, 500px, because it made it too easy to search for and post explicit content. This is also a problem for Twitter and Apple, because Vine has generated so much buzz (the service even crashed days ago because of a surge in users trying it out) and holds so much promise.

So will Apple ban Vine?

Perhaps the better question is, "Will Apple be consistent in their pornography policy?" The app 500px didn't last on iOS, being taken off the App Store with this statement from Apple: "The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We've asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app."

However, other Apple Apps, notably Twitter itself, can purvey easily-accessible explicit material. Nick Bilton's same Twitter search will bring up far more explicit material posted with Twitter-enabled photo sharing, like Twitpic. And both Twitter and Twitpic are not banned by Apple, because that would be a crazy bad business move for iOS. So what's more important to Apple, consistency with its anti-pornography app policy, or supporting an app with a lot of potential, which is mostly not used for displaying naughty bits? We'll find out soon.

Meanwhile, Vine's terms of services mentions that "All Content... is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content," and that "You understand that by using [Vine] you may be exposed to Content that might be offensive..." Furthermore, there's a way to flag offensive material: "Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures)."