Vine tries to shake its porn problem, bans sexually explicit content

Vine’s has a big problem with sexually explicit content pretty much since day one. A few days after launch, it found it necessary to introduce a 17+ age rating and now it’s officially banning x-rated content.

In an official blog post, announcing changes to its terms and conditions, the Twitter-owned video-sharing app makes note of a small number of a “very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community”.

For most of its users, it says, the new rules don’t change anything. “For the rest,” Vine says: “we don’t have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet –– we just prefer not to be the source of it”.

The new regulations come into effect immediately, and Twitter’s posted an article attempting to clear up what exactly is covered under the new rules. According to the article, sexual content includes “depictions of sex acts, nudity that is sexually provocative or in a sexual context, and graphic depictions of sexual arousal”.

That apparently does not mean however that Vine is set to become a paragon of puritan virtue. “We allow depictions of nudity or partial nudity that are primarily documentary, educational or artistic in nature. We also allow suggestive posts, just not sexually explicit ones,” says Twitter.

The new regulations suggest that Twitter’s previous attempts to eliminate sexually explicit content on Vine have been less than satisfactory and that it feels banning it outright is the best way to go.