Business

Twitter moves to hide porn on Vine app

Amid concerns over adult content popping up on its new Vine video app, Twitter appeared Tuesday to have restricted how users can share sexually explicit clips.

As with Twitter, Vine users can create and search hashtags (#CNN, #news, #tech, for instance) to share posts with a wider audience or find lots of content about the same subject.

By Tuesday morning, hashtags that had worked Monday – including searches for the terms "porn," "nude," "sex" and "naked" – were among those that delivered no results.

That doesn't mean that pornographic content has disappeared from the Vine app. But it's no longer as easy to find, or share, huge caches of the stuff with a single click.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Rolled out last Thursday, Vine is a mobile app that lets users create six-second video clips and share them through the app, on Twitter, or both. While Vine has already been used to post some creative videos, like virtually any Web tool that allows user-created content it has also been used for the mass display of naughty bits.

The issue came to the forefront over the weekend when an explicit video appeared under the prominently displayed "Editor's Picks" section on the app's main page.

Twitter said the video appeared due to an employee's error and it was removed.

The porn issue was a public-relations stumble for Twitter and for what appears to be a quickly adopted app. Since its release, Vine has been among the most popular free apps in Apple's app store. Currently, Vine is only available on Apple mobile devices.

With its restrictions, Vine's new model appears to more closely resemble the one used on Facebook-owned Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app. Salacious hashtags also deliver no results there.

On Tuesday, there were still some workaround-style hashtags on Vine with which users were sharing adult videos. Presumably, Twitter might monitor and start deleting those as well.