Only few days ago Twitter has its own video app Vine published in the Apple store – and the new app already has a porn problem!

Although Apple’s Terms and Conditions clearly prohibit the dissemination of pornographic material, there’s always a way around this. But when it comes to the enforcement of Apple’s ToS, as well as the apps’ algorithms that monitor user content, there seems to be plenty of room for interpretation.  While Apple was quick to pull the app 500px for making pornographic material too easily accessed, the six-second porn video inadvertently spread via Vine‘s Editor’s Picks was mildly reprimanded in comparison, still freely accessible on the App Store.

But it’s not like Vine is hiding the fact that users are allowed to upload what Apple would consider “questionable content.”  Where things went terribly wrong with Vine, so quickly after its iOS launch, was a human error resulting in a pornographic video clip being featured on the site.

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake we removed the video immediately,” a Vine spokesperson said.  “We apologize to our users for the error.”

Inappropriate policy

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What could go wrong with users posting video on the Internet? Vine allows its users to share six second videos, which can then be seamlessly embedded within tweets.

The foray into video and multimedia is new to Twitter, which evolved from a simple text-messaging service. Twitter’s increasing emphasis on delivering media through its network has caused quite a goof-up, showing vulnerabilities in the social media platform’s latest development.

Compared to Facebook, which has been pretty strict about its photo-sharing policies. And the same goes for its extended family.  If you search #naked or #porn on Instagram, the photo-sharing app renders no results. Instagram is an Apple-like closed environment, and sexually explicit images are difficult to find there.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and others services all faced similar NSFW hurdles at some point of time when they were young, but have since successfully instituted self-policing mechanisms to keep porn and other questionable sex related contents in check.

Problems with Vine’s hashtag algorithm?

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Vine’s iPhone app is just one week old, and still working out the kinks. The inevitable deluge of pornography appears simply to be a problem with the algorithm that the company used to determine its Editor’s Picks.

As virtually every new video or photo-sharing service has shown one issue or another, it’s up to the end users to help out the likes of Vine and Twitter.  Users can report inappropriate videos, and those determined to violate Vine and Twitter guidelines can be removed from the site.  But on the backend, Twitter will still have to take extra care on the human side as videos are promoted to its users.

That means Twitter will need to find a balance between its artificial intelligence and its willing user base.  The algorithm will incorporate an increasing amount of human generated data around likes and comments, leveraging the very essence of the #hashtag it helped make famous.