Twitter launched Vine on Thursday. Vine lets users create and share videos lasting up to six seconds. Building on the huge success of Instagram, Vine users can follow other people, whose posted videos show up in a feed on their phones and can be easily shared.
On Monday, four days after its release, hard-core pornography showcased in the prominent Editor’s Picks section of the mobile app. <Giggle.> The algorithms had gone either wrong or right, depending how you see it, and recognized that porn was a rapidly accelerating trend.
Porn and technology have always had an symbiotic relationship. Almost as soon as photography was invented, it was being used to produce pornographic images. I worked in videotape marketing when it began, and porn hugely accelerated the explosion of video rental stores. For the first time, people could view smut in the privacy of their home, rather than venturing to some seedy part of town with the perverts.
Porn accelerated the Internet as well. I used to attend Comdex in the ’90s and I remember one year when there were so many x-rated exhibitors that they moved it to a separate area on it’s own, which of course was called – Cumdex. Porn accounts for so much Internet traffic that when you use a traffic ranking service like Hitwise porn is automatically suppressed from the rankings. Otherwise, the numbers overwhelm all other traffic.
On Twitter’s end, the anything-goes aspect of Vine fits with the site’s overall philosophy. Twitter allows its users to register under fake names and has fought governments and law-enforcement agencies seeking user information. Twitter has never tried to regulate adult content – search #twitterafterdark at your own peril.
Then there’s Apple. Apple doesn’t like a scandal, particularly one below the belt. If not for Twitter’s close integration with iOS, Apple might have removed Vine immediately from the App Store. Journalists and bloggers jumped on the issue immediately, calling it “Vines porn problem.” But, in many ways it was Apple’s.
Vine fixed their editor’s picks algorithms and pushed porn below the surface. Apple saved face and solved the problem by slapping a17+ rating on the app – something any child could thwart.
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