Twitter’s video-sharing app Vine features porn in ‘Editor’s Picks’

TORONTO – Twitter’s video-sharing application, released last week, has already encountered controversy after pornography managed to make its way to the top of the “Editor’s Picks” section.

The pornographic video was featured on Monday morning in a section of the app which appears in each users home feed. It was quickly removed by the team.

What’s puzzling about the incident is that the Editor’s Picks section is hand-selected by Vine staff in order to highlight interesting and creative videos that users produce.

Twitter responded to the incident stating that “human error” resulted in the pornography making its way to the section and apologized to users for the error.

“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. We apologize to our users for the error,” said a Twitter spokesperson Monday.

This comes after the new application, which allows users to create six-second videos that run in continuous loops, came under fire over the weekend as users discovered that searching for the hashtags #porn or #sex would result in pornographic content.

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Sure enough, the video that was featured in Monday’s incident was tagged with the hashtag #sex, according to a screenshot captured by Mashable.

Apple has a record of removing apps from their App Store that feature pornographic images.

Just last week, Toronto startup company 500px had its app removed from the App Store following a review of their application that found it too easy for users to search for pornography.

Apple issued a statement to Global News last week regarding the removal of 500px’s app stating, “The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines.”

Vine, which is currently available to iPhone and iPod touch users only, includes a similar search feature that allows a user to search for content using hashtags. If a user were to search for the hashtags #porn or #sex, it would result in graphic content.

Global News contacted Apple asking if Vine was under review for featuring pornographic images, but was not issued a response at time of publication.